I just Beat The GMAT!

At the end of October I decided that I wanted to take the GMAT and scheduled for the weekend of Thanksgiving. I had set this as the 'baseline' test for myself as well and decided to do it with three weeks of preparation while working in consulting and with a wife and 1 year old at home. When I took the first practice I got a 620 and realized that I was really far and almost canceled the test, but since this was the 'baseline' I decided to push through, here is a brief description of what I did:

I didn't study much for IR or AWA, these are not as critical and I knew that studying for quant and verbal would prepare me better for the IR portion of the test than anything else I could do.

I purchased the Manhattan GMAT books and decided to go through them one at a time from start to finish (I spent the first day just reading the roadmap) and do every problem in them and I set a daily study session schedule that was like this:

Monday-Friday:

20 Quant questions in 35 minutes, then spend time going over each answer I got wrong and redoing it without looking at the explanation until I knew how to do it; then I would go through a Manhattan book for as long as I could during the evening answering the questions in the practice sets and also doing the explanation questions in each chapter. I switched between quant books and the SC book, with little focus on Reading Comprehension or Critical Reasoning because I was scoring ok there and SC is the easiest way to improve on the Verbal section.

Once a week I would scan through the Kaplan and Princeton Review books that a friend gave to me just to see if there were any techniques that made logical sense for me on things like combination /permutation or probability and I would do a few of those to test different ways (I found the manhattan explanations to be generally best, then the princeton, then kaplan but each had one or two techniques that were useful)

At the end of each night I would walk through either Data Sufficiency or Sentence Correction (my weak areas) questions (~5) with my wife to see if I understood it well enough to explain it to someone that wasn't studying. I think this helped most with my Sentence Correction because she is still learning english so I really had to be able to explain the reason why each sentence was wrong.

Saturday: Practice Tests

Full length test around the 1st of November - 620 (Manhattan)
Verbal and Quant only (because I didn't have 4 hours) a week later- 650 (Manhattan)
Planned on taking the following two saturdays (didn't work out because we went to NY to help with Hurricane Sandy Cleanup
Wednesday before the Saturday test- Full length exam- 740 (GMAC official practice test) *Save these they are the most like the real test*
For Thursday and Friday before the test: I did a full practice session on Thursday and did a two hour study session on Friday but closed the books around 6 and had dinner and watched a movie with the family to relax a bit.

Sunday: No studying, take a well deserved break.

Test Day:
I was scheduled around 12, so I got up about 9 and had breakfast and did 5 medium questions in each section to warm up (I wasn't doing well and thought that this was psyching me out so I took it down a notch after a little while).

In the end my score breakdown was:

Verbal: 44- 97th percentile
Quant: 48-78th percentile
IR: ?
AWA:?
Overall: 740- 97th percentile.

wow.. congrats. great score. !!

Wow! That's so impressive. I know you were super dedicated in those 3 weeks but that jump seems so unrealistic for most folks. Just goes to show that if you're really strategic about your studying, anything is possible.

Congrats on your success and thanks for sharing your journey!

Congratulations on your score. However I am a bit confused by your Quant score and subsequent percentile. I also took the GMAT on Monday and I scored the same 44 on quant, however I was only in the 63rd percentile. How is it possible to have such a discrepancy? Is there something about the scoring of the GMAT I am missing?

Calabash, the only discrepancy was my error in reporting; I didn't have the paper with me when I wrote the post, I confirmed my score and quant was indeed higher. Thanks for the catch!