chrvlachos wrote:I am planning to take the GMAT in late July in order to improve further on my weak side, which is the quantitative section. My target is to improve from about 42 to 46+ on this section. What would you recommend? ( I find that the questions in the OG that are classified as "hard" in the online tool to be inadequate for someone who is targeting higher than 650)
Go over those past mock tests with or without using a formal error log and figure out what are you weaker areas in quant, and I don't mean three of them; I mean at least eight or ten. You can tell that you are weaker in an area by looking at which questions you got wrong, which took forever and which you don't even like seeing appear on the screen. You may also just know somehow that you are not comfortable dealing with certain types of quant questions. Then focus on each of those weaker areas until you can rock questions of each type.
When I say focus on each I mean learn all about them and do at least maybe two or three dozen questions of each type, doing similar questions one after the other, so that you really get a sense of how to get those right. This is different from working via the Official Guide which does not have great concentrations of similar problems.
Who does have concentrations of similar quant problems? The BellCurves GMAT question bank does, I believe Grockit does, though I am not as familiar with their question bank, and to a degree the GMAT Club tests question bank does.
I and others have gotten a lot of use out of the BellCurves question bank, which can be broken down into dozens of categories of questions. While I admit the explanations are not always that great, you do the hardest questions in each category in that bank and you will be well on you way. (BellCurves is not a great source of verbal questions, by the way.) To access the bank you just need to set up a GMAT practice account.
Another decent source of tricky quant questions, though they are not broken down into categories, is the Veritas Question Bank. I am sure there are others. I come upon new sets all the time.
Meanwhile, remember to work on verbal too. You don't want to show up at the test and totally rock quant and get SMOKED on verbal. That can happen if you slack off, or at least you might be a little unsatisfied with your verbal section score.
