Swaziland's actually nice, and it's a quick flight to Cape Town. Chad, not so much. The first piece of advice I would give you is: relax. Your life is not made or broken by your GMAT score or what b-school you go to (or even whether you go to B-School). I've been out of college five years, and the last two years I pulled in well over 100k, and hope to make about 500k this year on a real estate transaction. I had a 2.7 undergrad GPA. So calm down. You're never going to beat the GMAT carrying that kind of pressure into the test. My advice:
Q: I only read the first 120 odd pages of the OG book. Every equation, geometric principle, or set rule is in there. Learn all that by heart. Get comfortable figuring out which equations to use for particular word problems. This is where I shaved a bunch of time off my answers. Instead of trying to do weird scratch math, you can simply restate the problem in an equation, and even if you don't solve it exactly, or do some bad arithmetic, you'll be able to knock out a couple of wrong choices immediately. The benefit of taking the practice tests using the same timetable of the real tests is that you'll figure out how to allocate time, and not ending up guessing on the last 6 questions.
V: On the CR stuff, read the questions first. You'll subconsciously know what to look for when you read the passage and be able to compare answers. As the questions get harder, the choices seem to get more and more similar, so you have to really dig into what they're asking. also in SC, same thing. The high level answers look so similar to each other, you have to dig like mad to find out what the difference is. Pay attention to matching tenses, verb agreement, etc, and say the sentence in your head. If it sounds wrong, it probably is wrong.
Also, read a book, preferably something non-fiction/technical, in a different field. They're professionally edited, and you'll get a feel for discerning arguments, grammar, and sentence structure. I read a book called Refabricating Architecture. I don't know squat about architecture, and I have no objective data to prove that reading helped me, but it can't hurt to expose yourself to 160 pages of arguments and counterarguments about a subject you're not familiar with. Because I read it with no preconceived notions of what is right or wrong, I had to decide for myself if the arguments were convincing, what kind of data would have made the arguments more or less convincing, etc. The exact same things you'll be doing on the V section of the GMAT. Also, it looks good on your application that you read for pleasure and have an interest in different fields. good luck.
