GMAT Strategy

I've been taking a look on this site and thought that it was a great resource for the GMAT and decided to register. Hopefully, I can contribute to this site as others have contributed.

I'm starting my first day of a GMAT prep course today and I'm excited to take a look at the books. After three weeks of personal study from various sources, which I will delineate later, I took the GMAT Prep practice exams only to see that my score was a mere 480

I'm shooting for a 650-700 score and shooting to do the GMAT around mid to late November. I've heard of people studying rigorously for 2 months and achieving scores of 700+!

I've also heard other stories of people studying for 6 months while working full time and also getting phenomenal scores. These stories are truly inspirational and are additional motivation especially in light of such a dismal score. Seeing as how I'm unemployed and don't intend to find employment for a while, I can commit a good amount of time to GMAT study.

So a few questions to everyone out there, what was the biggest jump in score that you've heard of? Is it impossible to increase a quant score with poor math ability? Can anyone recommend a good book for quant? It's been about 10 years since I've studied math seriously, so I need to brush up on some principles, learn definitions and number properties all over again. Any help is appreciated.

I've made three study schedules, alternating the sections I will study in a day, mixing days with quant and verbal, and mixing in all sections in one day with taking a practice exam every week, or at discretion. I've used the following resources

Official Guide 12
Official Guide Quant Review
Official Guide Verbal Review
Manhattan Sentence Correction Guide
Barron's GMAT 2008

I felt that the Official Guide's were good for its questions, but not very informative in their lessons. In fact, the Manhattan Verbal Guide, specifically sentence correction, has been the best learning tool for me so far. They present the rules and principles in a logical manner and have good practice drills after each lesson. Just my personal opinion, but I found the Barrons GMAT to be very unhelpful. It was however good at exposing me to the question types that I would expect, but overall I found it to be the least informative, with the least amount of practice questions.

If anyone else can help me with some resources your help is greatly appreciated. Specifically, I'd like to know where I can get some more practice tests that are in the opinion of the people on this forum, difficult and best mirror the actual test. I'd also like to know how everyone else is doing in their studies and what kind of study strategies people are using.

Thanks for reading this post and again, hello!

When you got 480, what's your score breakdown? You should not only know what you got on quant vs verbal, but the types of quant and verbal questions (arithmetic, geometry / SC, CR, and RC).

(Side note: Didn't do it myself for quant...oh well lol)

From here, you can easily see the areas to target. In my case, on my practice exam I did well in RC and CR but not as well on SC, so I'm going to focus more time on SC.

Reply with that, and then we can go from there!

PS: As for which practice tests, it seems nothing beats the two official practice tests. They're the only ones with the official scoring algorithm. I took the first one to establish a baseline, and then will take the second one after my prep, maybe a week before my scheduled test to see what areas I've improved in and what still needs tweaking.

Hi Perminology,

Not trying to be biased towards a particular test prep company but these have helped me in my PREP so here goes my 2 cents:

1) Get the Manhattan gmat quant strategy guides(5 in total),Manhattan gmat SC Verbal guide/RC guide, Powerscore gmat CR bible
2) OG 11 or 12
3) GMAT PREP EXAMS taking it over and over again and getting yourself familiar with the question types.You can find the solution to almost all gmat prep questions on this site(may take some time to search) In addition visit this site and Manhattan gmat site for more gmat prep questions. GMAT prep is the closest to the real deal and have no doubts about it.
4) For additional practice Manhattan gmat exams (5 in total) which u get for free if u buy even one of their startegy guides


Let me know if you have any specific questions and I will be more happy to provide inputs. Hope this helps!

Regards,
Cramya

Thank you both for replying to my post, which was about a month ago. Since that time I've been studying like crazy.

I've joined the Veritas Prep course, at quite a large expense I must say. In truth, both of you were right about the Manhattan Guides. Manhattan SC guide logically breaks down SC in a way that sticks perfectly! I now get about 90% of all SC questions I do correct. Equivalent/comparison errors seem to be the toughest for me now, but keeping a watchful eye seems to be the best formula.

Data sufficiency seems to be the biggest hurdle right now. I've gotten use to the question format, but this tells me that I'm not too grounded in the fundamentals, so I'm focusing on those more, i.e tricky wording, remembering to treat each statement separately, I'm considering purchasing the Manhattan quant review, as I think Veritas does a wonderful job in explaining the verbal. Their methods for critical reasoning and reading comp are fantastic comprehensive and saves me lot of time.

I took a practice test yesterday and got a 560. My target score seems like its becoming a reality!

This website, is also a fantastic resource for learning how to solve problematic questions. I used to search the specific questions I got wrong, and then learn how others solved them.