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
![Confused :?](./images/smilies/confused.png)
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!