I just Beat The GMAT!

I have had a few days to relax and develop a great post-test stomach bug, and now I want to share my GMAT experience.

Materials:
Kaplan GMAT Premier 2015
Manhattan GMAT Books (Quant Only)
GMAT Official Guide 12
Khan Academy OG12 Quant
Target Test Prep - Flexible Learning Plan (Second Attempt)

First Attempt
Before my first GMAT attempt, I spent about 2 months studying as hard as I could. I studied completely on my own using the Kaplan Premier book, MGMAT Quant Books, and OG12. I felt like I had an extremely strong grasp on the material but was still extremely nervous on test day, mainly because I hadn't studied for AWA at all and had done minimal studying for the IR section. Reluctantly, in early September, I drove to the nearest testing center to learn my fate.

I breezed through both the AWA and IR sections and took the first break feeling on top of the world. I had decided the night before that I wanted a 700 and I was feeling more confident than ever about the test since I had just killed the first two sections. When I sat down for the Quant section, I felt great until my first problem was some sort of obscure sequence question. I tried for at least 5 minutes to solve the problem and stumped took what I presume to be the "bait" answer from underdeveloped calculations. Knowing that some reports say that the early questions are more valuable while others disagree but I was hopeful that I could make up for this mistake... I couldn't. I can't even remember the next question but I remember knowing that I didn't get it right. The rest of the Quantitative section felt like a game of catch up, but I could tell I wasn't gaining ground because most of the questions felt too easy. I knew then that I hadn't scored to my full potential.

The Verbal section was uneventful and I ultimately scored right where I wanted to on it. I ended the test with a 690 (44Q, 41V) along with a 7 on IR and a 6 on the AWA. While early in my GMAT prep journey I would've been happy with this score, I knew it wasn't good enough to get into my top choice, UCLA.

Back to the Drawing Board - Target Test Prep
My girlfriend and I had planned a post-GMAT anniversary trip and I had to catch up on a lot of work that I had put on the back burner to focus on studying, so the remainder of September involved a lot of math dreams, but no significant prep work. I foolishly decided that a couple of weeks would be significant for honing in on my weaknesses and improving my score.

When we returned from our trip, I started spending my afternoons and evenings at the Starbucks that has become all to familiar for me and was re-working my way through the Manhattan Books, the OG problem sets, and a handful of Veritas CATs. However, after almost a week of studying, I didn't feel as if I was improving. I KNEW all the material that I was working on, but I also knew that my level of competence and comfort had not fared very well on my first attempt. I started looking for alternative methods and began looking for YouTube Tutorials on anything that was a. giving me difficulties or b. too boring the second time around. This is where I stumbled on Target Test Prep. I watched a handful of their videos regarding combined work and distance problems and decided to look around their website. I e-mailed Jeff Miller and Scott Woodbury-Stewart from Target and asked a handful of questions regarding the program, the trial, etc. and found him to be extremely helpful. With about 11 days left until my test, I decided to sign up for the 5-day trial.

From my first full day with the TTP curriculum, I loved it (well as much as you can love doing 12 hours of math every day). The strengths of the Target program are that it has almost nothing in common with the more popular materials. They don't have any CATs, they don't direct you to the Official Guide at all, and they don't try and teach you "test taking techniques." The focus of the Target Program is to make you better at GMAT math, period. This worked perfect for me, because I had already developed my own methodology for solving Data Sufficiency problems (based on Kaplan's 1-2-T-E-N) and while TTP consistently urges students to "do the Algebra," I had a good idea on when I preferred to pick numbers to get quick results.

The amount of information in the Target online book is truly impressive, all of the examples include video explanations of how to work the problems that can be revealed and hidden as you work through the information. Additionally, they also have chapter quizzes for ever section that generally contain over 100 questions for each chapter. These quizzes were what allowed me to actively re-prepare through all of the material in such a short amount of time. Instead of reading the chapters I would go straight to the first "medium" quiz. After completing it, I would look at the questions I got wrong and go to the sections covering those topics (easily linked). After reviewing those sections, I would re-work the questions I got wrong and move to another medium quiz until I was scoring 90% or higher. At this point I would move to the hard section and repeat, letting the quizzes direct me to where I needed to go. This minimized any extra time that I was spending any information on problems that I already knew.

On Monday (day before the test) I returned to YouTube to give myself a slight refresher on verbal material. I didn't beat myself up over it, just wanted to make sure that I wasn't going in without a minimal level of preparation in that area. I also worked through a handful of combinatoric/probability questions since those have proven to be a weak point in the past.

Second Attempt

My test yesterday was scheduled for 2pm. I know everyone is familiar with this part, but I showed up about a half an hour early, signed the form and yada yada yada. I sat down and had a very similar topic for AWA so I was able to breeze through the essay. My IR experience this time was considerably more difficult, but still not to bad. I took my 8 minute break to go clear my head, drink some water and hope that I wasn't on my way to a repeat Quant failure. When I sat down, I was able to quickly work my way through the first two questions and let out a huge sigh of relief. The rest of the quant section went pretty smoothly, I felt like my pacing was greatly improved due largely to the large timer in the Target program. When finishing the quant section I knew that I had done better than before.

The verbal section however, felt a lot more difficult, especially regarding sentence correction. I felt like I was catching myself at the last second on a number of idiom issues that could've definitely set me back. This caused me to get into my head a little bit and I began to think that my verbal score might be plummeting. However, I continued on and finished with a whopping 19 seconds to spare. In case it is of any interest to readers about my verbal strategy. I followed the "Kaplan Method" to a T on verbal

From critical reasoning questions relying on assumptions, I would write "E -... A-... C-..." vertically down on my booklet and fill in the evidence, conclusion, and necessary assumption. For inference and bold faced questions, I would summarize individual portions and determine the relationships, or what must be true. On reading comprehension problems, I made a passage map with one sentence for each paragraph, and would mentally note subject/scope/and purpose. I would reference the passage map to figure out where to hunt for the correct answers. All of the sentence correction questions I read silently and would attempt to develop my own answer before looking at the answer choices.

Results & Conclusion

After keeping my eyes closed for a solid 20 seconds after page 6/6 of the survey and repeating "please start with 7," I opened them to see a score of 720 with a 47 Quant and a 42 Verbal: Improvements in both areas! My IR score dropped to a 6, but I am trying not to let that get under my skin too badly.

While my satisfaction has been clearly expressed already, it bears repeating that preparing with Jeff and Scott at Target was pivotal to my score improvement. Without the breath of fresh air and some new approaches to the GMAT material, I doubt that I would've experienced this same improvement in such a short amount of time.

Thanks for reading!