GMAT prep plan: help needed.

[djc]

Hi guys ,


I take the gmat on the 12th of september which leaves me with roughly 11 weeks of prep time. On an average, I intend to put in 15-20hrs/week. I have the following resources:

OG11
Kaplan800
Kaplan comprehensive
Manhattan sentence correction.


Cliff gmat (8th edition)
Nova gmat (2004)
peterson gmat (1st edition)

I do know that the og is the bible and intend to do it comprehensively in the last weeks. I also do realise that since I am aiming at a high score(700+) Kaplan quant would be quite helpful. Manhattan sc is also imp(going by other reviews).
What I am not sure about is whether doing the rest would be worthwhile or would I just be wasting time. The reason why I was thinking of doing them was because I have not studied in the last 9 years and am quite rusty at a lot of things. The og is more like a question bank not like a
course that you can work trough.Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards

Dev

[lunarpower]

Hi guys ,


I take the gmat on the 12th of september which leaves me with roughly 11 weeks of prep time. On an average, I intend to put in 15-20hrs/week. I have the following resources:

OG11
Kaplan800
Kaplan comprehensive
Manhattan sentence correction.


Cliff gmat (8th edition)
Nova gmat (2004)
peterson gmat (1st edition)

I do know that the og is the bible and intend to do it comprehensively in the last weeks. I also do realise that since I am aiming at a high score(700+) Kaplan quant would be quite helpful. Manhattan sc is also imp(going by other reviews).
What I am not sure about is whether doing the rest would be worthwhile or would I just be wasting time. The reason why I was thinking of doing them was because I have not studied in the last 9 years and am quite rusty at a lot of things. The og is more like a question bank not like a
course that you can work trough.Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards

Dev

hi -

first of all, good luck, and don't get discouraged. it is easy to be intimidated by the test if you haven't studied this sort of material for a while, so stick in there and keep your head up.

the guides in the first half of your list are going to provide lots and lots of practice between them - to the point where you honestly might not even need the other ones, especially if you're taking PRACTICE TESTS from a variety of other sources. (you get to take practice tests from our website with the purchase of the mgmat sentence correction guide, and you can also take 2 free practice tests from the gmatprep software.)

make sure that you study with the appropriate DEPTH, not just BREADTH. this is going to be difficult at first - there won't be that many connections to make when you're just digging back into the material after 'retirement' from academic study - but you should try to RELATE problems to each other in order to gain the maximum benefit from them.

for EVERY problem:
* don't concentrate on the solution to that actual problem, since you can be sure you aren't going to see that actual problem on the exam
* instead, try to find TAKEAWAYS from the problem, which you can then APPLY TO OTHER PROBLEMS. this is key - DO NOT LEAVE A PROBLEM until you have extracted at least one piece of information, whether a formula, a strategy, a trick/trap, etc., that you can apply to OTHER problems.
do not leave a problem until you can fill in the following sentence, meaningfully and nontrivially:
"if i see _____ ON ANOTHER PROBLEM, i should _____"
* notice the SIGNALS in the problem that dictate which strategy to use. if you miss the problem, then notice the strategy that's used in the book's solution (not always the best solution, in the case of the o.g., but better than nothing), and go back to see if there are any signals 'telling' you to use that strategy.

good luck.

[lunarpower]

i just realized that i never really answered the direct question that you posed above. heh.

don't buy the second tier of books until you are ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have EXHAUSTED the first tier of books.

and that doesn't just mean that you've solved all the problems in them; that means that you have found the signals, takeaways, etc. as references in the previous post, for ALL of the problems. only then should you turn to sources such as peterson's, etc.

also: for sentence correction in particular, if you're checking idiomatic usage, go ONLY with the idioms from the official guides, or from our mgmat sentence correction guide (in which all the idioms are taken directly from the official guides' usage standards). other books have been knows to use idioms in direct contravention of the ways in which the official guides use them, and, needless to say, that is bad.