But it looked all right to me back in 2009. got a 690, 50 in maths, 34 in verbal. I read a lot of stuffs on beatthegmat, still now because it has been a good experience for me and I like to read stories about you guys struggling with it and think "well, this thing is well behind me now...", sorry about that. 570 on my first attempt, I started from scratch and scheduled an appointment only 1 month after. Not so good at verbal, but felt confident with maths. I basically studied the right way for three weeks (well, let's say two big week-ends because I was working and I also had to take care of my girlfriend So... this is the right way: (or at least the right way for me). I forgot the stories saying "I have been studying for my GMAT for 2 years now, bought the official GMAT book, the Kaplan, the OG, the GTest, I bought all the magazines with the words GMAT or MBA in it, etc". You know the type.

And I focused on practicing on the REAL test. What is the best practice you can find? It's this free GMAT test that you find on mba.com. The first time I took the real test I got disturbed with the format that was different from what I studied. And the questions were a hundred miles from what I studied as well, specially in maths. Not really more difficult, but different and that was enough to make me fail.

So... well, I just focused on this free GMAT test for three weeks (the questions change each time you take the test and you make mistakes), I was not really concerned with the time, but really wanted to understand EACH question and why I got the wrong answer if that happened. One technique that I took from a book I think is the guess technique, and I don't really know how, but I became pretty good at guessing the right answer in maths after a long exposure on the GMAT practice thing. This helped me a lot during the test, and I think I used this technique to "guess" 6 or 7 questions during the actual test. My second score proved me right.

My thought is: anyone can do it. My advice: stop buying useless books that will take your time and money away, focus on the actual test. Go on mba.com, do the test again and again and again (you should know some questions by heart at the end), make sure you understand all of the questions in there and can use the same way of thinking for similar questions, (if you don't, which answer makes more sens?) and you should be just fine. And don't forget to have fun.