if u honestly timed the mgmat cat and scored a 640 then trust me u can get a 650+ in a month's time,. gi through mgmat math guides, do og twice for quant.

take up og-10 for SC practise, and u will be good to go, use the BTG forums for aditional practise

Thanks for the tips! Does anyone else have any suggestions?

Hey jscpba,

First off, it's great to hear that you're back in action, and hopefully all the intervening issues are now going well!

Honestly, it's tough to give you any prescriptions based just on your scores, but I guess that leads me to my suggestion:

Analyze those practice tests!!

Try to determine, based on the mistakes that you made, questions that you missed, and time that you spent:

1) Which concept areas or question types do you need to emphasize? If you not that you missed, say, quite a few Number Properties questions or Sentence Correction questions, then you'll want to prioritize some study on those topics. With scores in the mid-600s, there's a good chance you still have 1-2 weaknesses that you can address.

2) Which mistakes do you tend to make when you do know the material but fall victim to "careless" or "silly" errors? This is a huge point here - it's really easy to dismiss an incorrect answer as a "silly mistake", but remember that you'll be taking the GMAT under timed conditions with some pressure involved, and that tends to exacerbate those silly mistakes. Try to get a good feel for which types of mistakes you'll make so that you can be aware and double-check for them. If you're scoring around 640 now, I'd bet that just eliminating those kinds of mistakes gets you to 680 or so.

3) How are you pacing yourself? Do you need to cut down your time on certain question types? Can you afford to slow down (and eliminate careless mistakes even more?)? If you need to pick up the pace - most of us do - then you can do some timed pacing drills with those types of questions to train yourself to work faster.

To get your score from the mid-6's to above 700, especially if you've done a bunch of studying already, it's probably a lot less about which books you use and more about how you diagnose your areas of emphasis and attack them specifically.