I just Beat The GMAT!

So I dropped out of med school and decided to go for b-school. I did it! I went from 570(Q41,V27)in early March to 730(Q48,V41) in early May. The first time I took the test, I breezed over grammar while studying thinking I knew it...boy was I wrong. After the first test, I practiced for the first month solely on grammar using the Manhattan GMAT SC guide. I made flashcards of every rule from the book and did tons of practice from the official guide. The next month, I worked solely on timing and taking real tests. A good friend who also scored well gave me some advice on timing: just think about the benchmark numbers (ie 60 minutes remaining, 8 questions done) I had to hit and nothing else. He also told me to spend a little extra time getting the first 7 questions right in both quant and verbal sections. Putting these two rules together, it's okay if you miss the first benchmark, but you must make the rest of the benchmarks.

I was doing Manahattan GMAT practice tests and not doing so well on them. I found the verbal portion of manhattan gmat practice tests to be atrocious; they had a few speculative answers in RC and CR and some flat-out wrong sentence correction questions. Also, the essay prompts were a little easier than the official ones. I started only using the IR and Quant sections as practice.

I retook the GMATprep tests scoring 670 on the first one and then 740(Q49,V42) on the second. I took them within a week of one another. What changed you ask? Well, I went through every problem on the first test and made sure I could do it backwards and forwards. I also worked on a few of my weakness areas (see next paragraph).

I had already gone through most of the OG 13 questions in the first few months of studying so I redid a few questions from my weakness areas (SC, percents, decimal/digits, and combinations). I then did practice sets from the official supplemental quant and verbal guides. I did the last 20 or so questions from each section and timed myself to what I would get on the actual test. The only sections I had trouble with were DS and CR. I did a few more problem sets on these topics.

Two days prior to the test, I studied my notecards (I made notecards of all the MGMAT guide books) and took a MGMAT practice test (quant section only) on which I only scored a 42 (timing was way off)! Then, I also did some more official critical reasoning problem sets to get me in the frame of mind of the test writers.

I arrived at the test center early - it was a fancy corporate office building complete with a security guard who knew I was scheduled to test that day. I gave him my name and he escorted me to the testing center. Some hot girl who was also testing that day smiled at me and I just knew I was going to crush the exam.

Side note: I was also on a diet/exercise regimen during my studying - I started eating correctly, exercising, and counting calories. In the 5 months that I studied for the GMAT, I improved my stamina from running only 12 minutes at a time (~1.5 miles) to running 45 minutes (~5.5 miles) at a time. I also lost 10 pounds, gained a six-pack and can do 3 sets of 50 pushups and 2 sets of 47 crunches in 20 minutes. Just like the GMAT, I pushed myself a little harder and a little further each day until I was able to achieve my goal. To clarify, I was never in bad shape to begin with (always was quite good at soccer), but now I'm in great shape.

Update - just got the IR and Essay scores. 7/8 IR and 5.0/6.0 essay. I'm all set!