550 to a 760! Woot Woot!

I started with Beat The GMAT. Absolutely the best resource. After reading class reviews, and getting a huge discount from BTG for Knewton, I went with Knewton. That said, they give discounts for everything so check it before you buy anything else. Also their question of the day, MBA admissions articles, and forums are awesome. Be sure to check out their free resource guide, and self study guide. If you run out of CATs from another service, you can easily get access to a bunch of free trial CATs from other services.

Because I used a BTG discount code, BTG gave me free access to THEIR question/answer/review service, which is now called Magoosh GMAT Prep. I have no idea if you get free/discounted access, but you can customize your practice tests, by length of time, unanswered q's or not, subject matter (if you want to do 50 questions about only probability, you can), etc. You can choose to either have the questions be in one level of difficulty (say "I only want to do 700+ level questions") or be like the CAT and be adaptive. They also have BOTH written and video explanations for EVERY SINGLE QUESTION. This was really helpful for me, because watching a video about how to go through the problem was much more helpful than just reading something that laid out everything. You can go back to any question you have ever done to review it, you can see all or just some of your review history, it gives your winning percentage for whatever timeframe you want. Overall, I found it really helpful in helping me study exactly what I needed to focus on during any particular study session. And the explanations were very good. That said, some of their question styling was weird - especially some of the upper level verbal questions.

I also used Grockit a little bit. Some of their resources you have to buy, but a lot are free, and I think BTG has a coupon code for free membership, so it's worth checking out. This is interesting because it's based on group study - they provide group study classes regularly, you can "race" against a group of four to answer questions on a quiz, and discuss options/answers. They also have a free video library that goes through EVERY SINGLE QUESTION IN THE OFFICIAL GUIDE. So if you are really stuck on one of the questions there, go to Grockit's OG Library and watch their lecture series. I didn't actually use this, but it seemed like a hugely helpful resource if need be.

Another thing that really helped me was making a study plan. Did I follow it to a T? Absolutely not. But laying out my three month plan helped me work around the times when I knew I would be really busy and helped me realized how much I needed to get done RIGHT NOW (whether it was a lot or a little), and helped me a ton with my pacing of all studying. I started studying on at the beginning of Feb and took it April 28th, to give you a time frame. Reading other people's success stories and 700+ study plans was HUGELY motivational, both in terms of "I can do it!" and "This is exactly what needs to be done before I do it". It helped drive me to create my own study plan (which was hugely helpful in terms of scheduling and mental prep).

Like I said, about two weeks before the test, I opened the Official Guide (OG if you like using jargon) for the first time. Part of this was by accident - In my study plan, I meant to start on it a lot earlier, but my time spiraled away from me. The OG has about 800 questions in it. I did about 100 per day, every day for about ten days. That was literally three to four hours a day. It was mentally EXHAUSTING. The fact that I was excited to go to my terrible job everyday after having studied is a sign of how much work this particular strategy is. That being said, because I literally inundated my brain with Official GMAT language for the ten days before the test, I was pretty damn fluent when the test rolled around. Nothing was a surprise - every question I saw on the actual test was a derivative if not exact replica of a question I had seen in the book. I used the other services to get really good at the concepts behind the questions, but I used the OG to get good at answering the GMAT question themselves. Everyone says this is the best resource because it is literally the same thing as the test, and they are not lying. Other services try to have the same language, but there is no substitute for using this. I think the reason I got a 760 and not a 720 was this one strategy. I would have done fine without going this route, but I am pretty convinced that this was a huge part of it.

Other random advice:
Know Thyself - I do not do well with flashcards. I made them, but I never used them and when I did, I didn't feel like I was actually learning anything from them. I also know I do really well under pressure, so putting more time and effort in close to my test date was very helpful; that is what convinced me doing the entire OG in ten days was a good idea. The more you customize your study plan to your strengths and weaknesses, the better you will be.

Do not focus only on your weaknesses - Most people spend most of their time studying to minimize/cover their weaknesses. When I went into studying, I basically said to myself "I am a native English speaker, I won't need to study verbal". WRONG. If you spend a marginal amount of time bolstering your strengths, you will be able to answer very high level questions in those areas VERY quickly, which is hugely important on test day. By spending my time pretty evenly on minimizing my weaknesses and making my strengths bulletproof, I was successful because I could spend most of my brain energy on the things I needed to spend it on, and not worry as much about how much I suck at probability, exponents, or critical reasoning questions. The other nice thing about studying in your stronger areas is that after taking a practice test on something you are good at, you get a lot of questions right. After seeing success rates below 50% for the stuff you are bad at, it's really nice to see a high success rate. Morale boost!

Do not neglect the essays - I did a lot of them to practice because I wanted to know what the winning formula was. Here is what all of my best essays had in common:
Intro: Short summary of question, state my position, brief overview of the evidence I am going to provide, transition sentence
1 Para: Specific evidence, a logical conclusion based on that evidence. Short, direct, and concise is the name of the game here.
2 Para: Specific evidence, logical conclusion.
Conclusion: What we learned, how that relates to my position and the original question asked.
I generally found that 3 body paragraphs rarely left me enough time to go back and reread AND I had a hard time consistently finding three solid examples for each question. I highly recommending perusing WSJ, NYTimes, and the Economist regularly if you don't already (I didn't), so you have a huge arsenal of examples at your disposal. Giving vague "what if" or "If this happened, then this would happen" examples did not cut it - the more real company names I used, or real people's actions I talked about, the better I did. Also, they are not looking for super sophisticated analysis - too much analysis might lose you more time than is worth it. Practicing writing these just once or twice is totally worth it. And more fun, because you get to write, not just pick A, B, C, or D.

The more work you put in, the more you get out - Simple man hours. It sucks but it's true.

This topic has expert replies