760/99% (Q50/93%, V42/95%) 6.0 AWA

Just received my official score report today and I'm pretty excited. While this is my first post, I read a lot of posts on this forum and found them super helpful. So I wanted to say thanks and share some of my experiences.

My Background:
I'm 4 years out of my engineering undergrad working in financial services. English is my first language and this is the first time I've written the GMAT.

Timelines:
I studied for this thing for about 5 weeks. First 4 weeks were pretty lax. I did 2 hours a day after work, an hour on the weekday subway commute, and maybe 3 hours a day on the weekend. I took the week before the exam off from work and studied 8-10 hours a day from Saturday until my exam on Friday at noon.

Materials:
PR:
I started out with PR and found it a useful refresher but didn't think it was very comprehensive. It's a very quick and easy read and a great resource to start out with.

MGMAT:
These books were awesome they are the most comprehensive. I bought all of these books except the VICs/Inequalities book as it was sold out everywhere I looked. I found the Number Properties and Sentence Correction books especially helpful.

GMAT800
I didn't like this book. While the questions were hard and good practice to get your brain warmed up, I didn't think the answers they gave for some questions were correct and didn't trust their explanations of what GMAT would consider right or wrong especially in the CR section.

OG11 and OGQuant/Verbal
These questions were the most reflective of the actual GMAT. The MGMAT questions were more wordy and the GMAT800 questions had lots of (what I felt were) incorrect answers.

Strategy:
I read all of the theory in OG, PR, and MGMAT and took notes on stuff I could not recall directly from my brain. Then I just did OG questions and MGMAT exams. As I didn't have enough time to do all the questions, I just did the last 75-100 OG questions for each section in the OG11/quant/verbal. I also wrote 3 MGMAT practice exams and 2 GMATPREP exams in the last two weeks.

The most valuable thing I did was keep an error log for every question I did incorrectly due to a concept I didn't understand (i.e. I didn't keep an error log for questions answered wrong because of careless mistakes). In the error log, I paraphrased the answer in my own words to help me retain the concept. I'd review these error logs regularly to make sure I internalized everything I didn't understand before.

I think the most interesting thing about my story is that I never scored over 720 in my practice exams.

Here are my results in the order I took them:
MGMAT Free Exam 680 (Q47, V36)
MGMAT Test 1 690 (Q42, V41) (didn't complete the last quant question)
GMAT PREP 720 (Q49, V40)
MGMAT Test 2 680 (Q45, V37) (didn't complete the last verbal question)
GMAT PREP 720 (Q48, V41)

Practice Exam Feedback:
I found the MGMAT practice exam questions a lot harder than the actual GMAT. They were wordier and there was much more emphasis on certain areas like probability. Also, the answers (especially in the CR section) were not as clear cut as the actual GMAT. What I mean by this is that some answers were really not very good and were the lesser of two evils compared to the other answer choices. This made MGMAT exams to be pretty good practice but not as good of a representation of real GMAT questions as the OG questions.

The other big issues I was having in the practice exam were a)timing and b)making stupid mistakes.

a) timing
This is critically important to master if you want to do well. I found early on in practice exams, I was pretty stubborn and didn't like to guess on answers. As a result I spent 4 even 5 minutes on a quant question and ended up having to rush through and guess questions at the end to make up for it. This was messing me up really badly. I ended up using a scheme I found on here that helped me:

? Q V
5 66 67
10 56 58
15 46 49
20 36 40
25 26 31
30 16 22
35 6 13
40 0 4

2 minutes a question on Quant, 1min 15 sec on SC, 1min 30-2 min on CR, and 2 minutes on RC was what I was aiming for and if I went over that by more than 30-60 seconds, I would guess.

On the actual exam, during the tutorial before AWA, I divided up the 10 grid pages and labelled 1-37 a)-e). And also at the 5th, 10th, 15th, etc. question, I marked down the time markers above (e.g. on question 5 in quant, I'd write 66) so I didn't have to flip back and forth between pages.

b) making stupid mistakes
I also found that I was making really stupid mistakes during the practice exam. And it was probably due to fatigue. No advice here other than to do two full AWAs before practicing quant and verbal questions to get you use to that. I didn't actually do that as I didn't really have time near the end.

I did a practice exam every other day, and in the day between the practice exam, I'd focus on the sections I performed poorly on in the practice exams.

AWA
I didn't do any AWA practice other than writing the 5 practice exams. I just used the PR template for analysis of argument and analysis of issue. I read a lot of business books so I was able to reference lots of studies in my essays (Good to Great by Jim Collins is a great one).

The day before the exam, I just relaxed, reviewed casually and got a good nights sleep. The morning of my 12:15pm exam, I ate breakfast and did 2-3 questions of each section to get my brain warmed up.

At the actual test, it all came together for me. I was relaxed, didn't go overtime on any questions, and (I'm guessing) didn't make too many stupid mistakes.

That's all I have for now. Good luck everyone!

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