First, this isn't some kind of miracle thread of how I went from a 540 to 750. Rather it's simply a story of satisfaction of moving from a 660(81st %ile) to a 700(90th %ile) which makes me a lot more competitive at my target schools.

Some background info on me:

BS Mechanical Engineering
MSE Civil Engineering

Officer in a US Military Branch - 8 years
Applying for matriculation in the Fall of 2013

I started prepping for the GMAT in January of this year with www.manhattangmat.com's self paced course. It was pricey, but B-school is a major investment, so I figured it would be worth the cost. I did self paced since my schedule didn't allow me to consistently attend a class at a certain time of day each week.

I did all the homework in between sessions and took 6 practice tests which are summarized below:

Test 1 (diagnostic, no prep): 590 (39Q 32V)
Test 2: 620 (43Q 32V)
Test 3: 640 (45Q 33V)
Test 4: 660 (41Q 39V)
Test 5: 650 (44Q 35V)
Test 6: 640 (43Q 35V)

During these tests, I never cracked the coveted 700. I was hopeful that my first time taking the GMAT would be a 7th practice test and I would improve. I sat for the GMAT for the first time May 7, 2011 and this was the result:

660 (44Q 38V)

I matched my best practice exam. Not shocking, but a little disappointing. I figured I just needed a little more to get me over the 700 hump, so I turned to www.gmathacks.com in particular, this article: https://www.gmathacks.com/study-tips/how ... blems.html

I registered to take the test a second time June 25 and focused on doing OG problems following GMAT Hack's study tips and was confident I would improve. The result was a disaster:

610 (Q41 34V)

After this score, I contemplated if I wanted to take this test again seeing how I'd devoted 6 months of my life already to the test. I decided I would take it a third time simply because I had the luxury of time...I wasn't applying this fall, so I couldn't use the excuse that my time would be better spent on essays. I took the month of July off and enjoyed having free time, then I drew up an aggressive 5-week schedule targeting a test day of Sept 7, 2011. I used two books and went through them cover-to-cover: https://www.totalgmatmath.com/ and https://www.totalgmatverbal.com/ When I went in to take my exam on September 7, the testing center had a power outage. Oops. Incident report filed and I re-scheduled for a week later, which yielded:

700 (49Q 35V)

Summary:

- I felt it was worth my time to take a prep course, but if you don't have the time/resources to do so (sitting through 3-hour classes is very time consuming), I highly recommend going through Total GMAT Math cover-to-cover. At $50 for the e-book, it's a bargain for what it can do for your quant score.

- Schedule your exam, create a study schedule and stick to it.

- Don't go overboard with practice exams. Once you know the format and the adaptive mechanisms, you're much better off spending that time doing practice problems.

- Be brilliant at the basics. You can't get to the really hard questions if you don't master the mid-level ones. Being solid on those questions is more important than studying obscure geometry problems.

- I don't have any good verbal tips. My strategy was to be quicker on CR and SC so I could methodically take apart the RC questions. The bottom line, is that some people are better at verbal than others. Some would make the same argument for the quant, but I was able to make much bigger gains on the quant side.


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