Total 720 (94%)
Quantitative 49 (87%)
Verbal 39 (87%)
AWA 6 (90%)
I'm happy about the balance as well. 39 in Verbal isn't super but it is alright I guess.
In total, I prepared for about 6 weeks. 3 weeks+1 week break after first attempt+3 weeks. I started preparing around the 2nd week of August, made the first attempt on 2nd September, scored 680 (47Q, 35V), spent a week feeling weird and thinking about whether I should re-take and finally decided to re-take on the 5th of October.
At the beginning of the preparation, I was aiming for around 680-700 and bought Kaplan Verbal, Kaplan 800 and OG Verbal Review. Kaplan Verbal was practically useless but Kaplan 800 and OG Verbal Review were good. My biggest mistake was and is that I didn't buy OG!
I spent some time reviewing Verbal from OG but was more focused on Quant. This was perhaps my second biggest mistake. For some reason, I thought I won't be able to improve so much in Verbal and felt confident (could be due to my practice CAT scores; I never scored less than 39 in them even before the first attempt).
I made the first attempt, scored 680. Initially I thought it was ok but somehow I felt I could do much better. For instance, I knew I could definitely get a few months more than 35 in Verbal. Furthermore, I panicked on Quant. The first question was not that difficult but somehow threw me off the chair. I spent too much time on a couple of questions and even had to guess the last two. Basically, I knew I could do much better.In addition, I had not taken a lot of CATs the first time around. Just the 2 GMATPrep tests and 1 free MGMAT.
I knew I didn't have to do much for Quant, except for regular practice and timing on the CAT (knowing when to let a question go and approaching every problem systematically). I knew I needed more CAT practice. I knew I needed to work on Verbal. I bought the Manhattan Sentence Correction Guide for multiple reasons: a) I read that it is really good for sentence correction, b) It comes with access to 5 additional CATs, c) MGMAT's CATs give decent explanation for all the answers you choose and d) Sentence Correction is the easiest to improve. I also bought the Powerscore Critical Reasoning Guide (which helped as well).
After a week of sulking, around the second week of September, I decided to start preparing again. I went through MGMAT SC and Powerscore CR and started practicing right away. I wasn't as disciplined in my preparation even during the 6 weeks that I did prepare. Some days I worked more, some days I worked less. A couple of days I didn't work at all. I made a spreadsheet on excel to keep track of my hit rates, types of mistakes and total number of problems solved for every type of question.
In the second phase of my preparation, I practiced a total of 90 RC, 50 CR, about 550 SC questions and re-did almost half of the 198 700+ questions. Note: these numbers don't include the questions I did from online forums.
I was already strong in Quant (800 in SAT Math) but zuleron's collection of 198 700+ questions really helped me practice. I did those and GMATPrep and MGMAT CATs. Kaplan 800 was good too!
Practice CAT Scores:
Before much preparation (Second week of August): GMATPrep 1 - 680 (44Q, 39V)
Later,
GMATPrep 2 - 720 (47Q, 41V)
21st August - MGMAT CAT 1 - 640 (44Q, 34V)
GMATPrep 2 Reset - 740 (49Q, 41V)
REAL GMAT - 2nd September - 680 (47Q, 35V)
Got these scores in the second preparation phase:
PowerPrep CAT - 730 (49Q, 41V)
15th September - MGMAT CAT 2 - 700 (44Q, 40V)
23rd September - MGMAT CAT 3 - 680 (44Q, 38V)
I was sort of annoyed by this score so I decided to take ANOTHER CAT later the same day. a) I thought it would be a good test of my endurance and b) I really believed it could my confidence. So:
23rd September - MGMAT CAT 4 - 710 (45Q, 41V)
27th September - GMATPrep RESET - 770 (51Q, 44V)
28th September - MGMAT CAT 5 - 700 (47Q, 39V)
30th September - PowerPrep 2 - 740 (48Q, 42V)
3rd October - MGMAT CAT 6 - 740 (47Q, 45V)
5th October - REAL GMAT - 720 (49Q, 39V)
I know this is a long post and perhaps 720 isn't special enough to need all these details but I really think this de-brief can help a lot of people. As you can see, my real score was closer to MGMAT. GMATPrep is really good and people say it is the best predictor of your real GMAT score but the thing with GMATPrep is that you see those questions in so many forums/OG books that even if you don't notice, you've done those questions before! I think this is one of the reasons why Quant stumped me the first time around. I wasn't expecting it to be extremely difficult. MGMAT prepared me for that. It helped me prepare that "I don't care. If I don't know it, I'll guess and move on without caring about it." strategy!
Resources that I recommend: Official Guide, MGMAT Sentence Correction, Powerscore Critical Reasoning and other MGMAT guides for e.g. Number Properties etc. (I didn't use these other MGMAT books because I am good at Quant but I've heard they are really good) Don't forget to surf through forum looking for problems!
In short: Don't give up, practice regularly, do as many CATs as possible (I recommend MGMAT), keep track of your mistakes and correct them and come up with a GMAT strategy and practice it. For example: Consider this a rule, if in 30 seconds you can't figure out how to approach a problem, skip it and review it later. You have to practice this so that when you get a bad-ass question on the exam, you don't let it stump you! Remember. Even if you get like 10-12 questions wrong in Quant, you can get a decent score.
Signing off, very happy!
Once again. Thanks to zuleron for compiling that list of 198 700+ questions, DanaJ for replying to a lot of my queries and everyone else here!
