Hi kks.
You talk about being overwhelmed by study materials, and actually that may give me a clue as to what you can do to improve.
This GMAT is not really a test of knowledge as much as it is a test of skill in approaching problems.
When I hear someone talk about being overwhelmed by materials, therefore, I wonder if that person is working on learning "stuff" rather than focusing on getting better at solving problems and seeing the materials merely as a tool for that.
For instance, one could either decide to learn all the strategies for solving exponent problems, or, one could work on solving exponent problems and use the materials as a resource for building one's approaches to doing so. In the first case, the person could become overwhelmed with stuff. In the second, the person would tend to only consider stuff when it helps improve skill.
The latter approach has been my approach and it has worked well.
I figured out what types of questions are on the test, as I suspect you have. Then I assessed my skill in finding the answers to each type, partly by doing practice tests and problem sets. Then for each area in which I felt I could be more skilled, pretty much all of them, I either just developed skill by doing more questions, or read up on approaches and thus learned faster than I would have by reinventing the wheel. The thing is that everything is driven less by what someone says I need to learn, a bunch of stuff, and more by my assessment of what skills I need to quickly answer the types of questions I suspect will appear on the GMAT.
As this process of assessing skills and developing stronger skills continues, one's score naturally goes up, as you realize.
Regarding the sections, here are some thoughts.
In preparing for quant, I take the attitude that I understand the concepts that are necessary for solving pretty much any question. If I had all day, or a month in some cases, I could figure out the answer, in nearly all cases. So almost every time I see a problem I go at it until I solve it. On the test I won't get points by giving up and asking for an explanation and so I seek to not do that when practicing either. Having said that, if I really get stumped, I still might not give up and go to the explanation. I might leave the question until the next day, and keep at it, or, rather than looking at the answer to that specific question, I go to the materials to see if I can find a strategy for solving the problem. That way I am still approximating the approach I will use when taking the actual test, which is to do my utmost to figure out how to use the resources I have, whatever they may be, to solve the problem. Sure, occasionally I will just go to the explanation, but that is the exception. In any case, my general attitude is that given enough time I could solve the problems, even if I had to invent math myself. I just need to learn what I need to in order to speed up the problem solving process so that I can answer enough questions in 75 minutes to achieve my target score.
So as I said, my approach is assessment of skill driven, rather than materials driven.
You can learn more about my quant score increasing strategy by reading this.
https://www.beatthegmat.com/780-debrief- ... 80962.html
While a good approach to increasing one's verbal score might be a little different from one for quant, it still would have similarities.
In verbal there are a few basic rules such as parallelism, placement of modifiers, and subject verb agreement that cover a significant part of sentence correction. So in this case, learning some stuff can be pretty useful.
At the same time, much of SC is about just doggedly seeking to find flaws in structure and using them to eliminate answer choices. Is it clear what a modifier is modifying? Do you need rules to figure that out? Not really. Anyone could say like "I am not sure what this means." or "This is much clearer."
As for critical reasoning, when doing questions, I don't take notes and don't worry too much about methodology. I just look for things like premises and conclusions, and see what is going on and use logic to answer the questions. The one really important thing I learned from reading up some is that on an inference question, the inference must be necessarily true given the information in the prompt. That was definitely helpful. In general though, CR is way light on needing to know "stuff" and way more about being good with catching details and applying logic.
RC is similarly about details and logic, and about assessing situations. My approach to improving on RC was mostly to just do some Veritas practice questions until I stopped getting smoked by my missing some detail or something. I did read up a little on RC strategy at some point, after doing some problems, and with my experience in doing problems I was able to see the value of the things I was learning about when reading up on strategy.
So there are some ideas anyway.
