I just Beat The GMAT!

I just took the GMAT last week and was very happy to receive a 710 score. I started the quant section a little nervous, and spent way too much time on a simple question, but because of my practicing, esp. on timing - I dumped the question and went on. Finished the quant section with about 15 seconds to go and made I think a fairly accurate educated guess on the last question.

Here are my scores from practice tests:

GMATPrep 640 V: 36, Q: 42
MGMAT 1 630 V:33, Q: 43
MGMAT 2 680 V: 35, Q: 48
MGMAT 3 600 V: 33, Q: 40
MGMAT 4 590 V: 34, Q: 37
MGMAT 5 670 V: 35, Q: 46
MGMAT 6 650 V: 45, Q: 35
GMATPrep 680 V: 36, Q: 47

Actual GMAT 710 V: 40, Q: 48, AWA: 6

As you can see - I was all over the place with my quant scores. I had a huge issue with timing and had to really practice on getting problems completed within the 2-minute timeframe - or just 'guess and go'.

To study I used:

Manhattan GMAT books (all 8)
OG Guide, 12th edition
OG Quant Review
Kaplan Verbal Foundations
Powerscore CR Bible
Powerscore SC Bible
Beat the GMAT Practice Questions (Thanks Eric!!)

Most helpful - the Manhattan Guides for quant, the Powerscore guides for verbal and the Beat the GMAT Practice Questions for SC specifically.

My tips:

Quant
Go through the Manhattan Quant Guides until you know the concepts inside out. Sign up for the 6 practice tests - I think their quant section is a little harder than the actual GMAT. For the OG Guide and the review, do all the practice questions. What helped me the most was to time each individual question and make sure I could do the questions as fast as possible. I didn't set a time limit like 2 minutes per se, rather I just looked at the question afterword and said to myself - could I do that problem faster? I made a note of those problems that I thought I could do faster and then went back and practiced only those questions. When I worked on a question I remembered from a previous practice - I made sure I thought through the concepts needed to solve the problem as opposed to just quickly getting to the answer.

I practiced looking at the answers before starting to work on the problem. Were the answers in fractions or decimals? Try to do your work in the form of the answer. Also - are the answers close together (i.e., you need an exact solution) - or far apart (i.e., once you are close enough you should be able to pick out the answer).

One of the issues I had with the quant is that I'm really detailed and slow - like to show all my work, and double check everything. Of course, this killed me on timing, so it was just a matter of practice and then practice some more.

Because I'm sort of methodical - read the problem, write out the equations, solve the equations - I also had a hard time starting from the answers and then plugging them in to see what worked. I did an exercise and forced myself for most of the medium/hard questions in the OG to start with the answers and test each answer to find the correct answer. Even though I didn't get that good using this method - it at least gave me a feeling of what types of problems where this method made sense.

Overall, I was always frustrated with my quant score and felt that I could always do better. In school I was always a top student in math, and never understood why my scores weren't higher. I spent probably 80% of all my study time on quant versus the verbal section.

Verbal
well, as you can see from my practice tests I was pretty consistent in the 34-36 range and my studying didn't seem to have much of an impact on my score. In the practice tests, 75% of the questions I missed were the sentence correction questions. I read the MGMAT SC guide and although it made sense while I read the rules; it was just too overwhelming. Not only couldn't I keep all the rules in my mind, I couldn't tell the must have concepts from the more advanced topics (and to be honest - I never even looked at the advanced topic chapters in the back). I oscillated between panic and an 'it is what it is' attitude. I also read the Kaplan verbal foundations and didn't have much luck with that either.

I ordered the Powerscore CR Bible about 2 weeks before my test having read reviews on this forum. I noticed that they had a Powerscore SC Bible too, so ordered that thinking 'what the heck - can't hurt'. Well, the SC Bible was really a turning point for me. It seemed to concentrate on fewer concepts and for whatever reason it just made perfect sense to me. I could do the practice questions in the book and have reasonable success. I also won access to the Beat the GMAT Practice Questions (answering an SC question correctly here on the forum of all things!), and used this resource extensively to work on the SC questions. What I liked most about the BTGMAT Practice Questions is you can select the type of SC question - so I would do all 'subject-verb agreement' questions in one set. I found this much more helpful than just practicing random questions. I begin to feel much more confident and that all was not lost on SC questions.

I also have to recommend the Powerscore CR Bible as being very helpful. The main take away for me from this book was the ability to identify the conclusion and then answer the question with the conclusion in mind.

What helped me the most was knowing myself and where my weaknesses were and then designing study plans specifically to address my weaknesses. I really didn't think I'd crack 700, but I did!