685 GMAT focus debrief: one month of studying with targettestprep

Find out how Beat The GMAT members tackled GMAT test prep with positive results. Get tips on GMAT test prep materials, online courses, study tips, and more.
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Joined: Wed Feb 14, 2024 12:24 pm
Hey everyone,
I quickly wanted to come here and share my GMAT focus journey. I studied with the online platform targettestprep for one month and managed to score a 685 (97th percentile) with the following subscores:
DI: 85 (99th percentile)
Verbal reasoning: 85 (96th percentile)
Quant 82 (76th percentile)

I initially decided to take the GMAT because I had a one-month break in January after my semester abroad and before the last semester of my undergraduate degree. Since I had such a short span of time, I wanted to use it as efficiently as possible. Since a friend of mine recommended Targettestprep to me, I decided to take advantage of their promotion and initially took the 5-day free trial. During this trial i really fell in love with the platform and their learning approach, which made me buy a normal monthly subscription. The first thing that caught my attention was the automatic planning of the course content that the platform automatically does for you after entering your desired score and test date. This enables you to really plan the learning phase well and also enables you to see whether you are on track or maybe lagging behind.
I also especially enjoyed the structure, which consists of constant exercises during the learning phase that enable a frequent sense of achievement andreally always encouraged me to keep on going and made the whole process more fun. Another great thing about that is that all theetc., are designed so that they imitate the actual test not only in the content progress. This but also in chapter tests, the interface and handling.

For me, the quant part definitely took up the highest part of my study time. Learning all the specific calculation methods and little tricks really takes some time. This is not really difficult but quite tedious since it involves a lot of different topics. The verbal part was actually quite easy for me from the start but it was for sure still helpful to have all the chapters and tests for the topic from ttp. Since I had a bit of time pressure at the end of my preparation, I actually only had two days to study for the DI section. However, most of the stuff there is pretty straightforward or includes topics from the quant or verbal section. So even tho i studied the least amount of time for it i had the best score there looking at the percentile rankings.

In the end, my time pressure also stressed me out a bit since I did not really have enough time to do a lot of practice tests anymore. It was super helpful to read the strategy chapters from TTP to learn more about how the test works and the strategies you can use. This made me way more comfortable for the test day.

All-in-all i really dont think my score would have been possible with traditional learning methods like preparation books or something and can only really recommend ttp for other people. Feel free to ask any questions here, I will try to answer all of them!