I have not posted a lot in here, but I have received so much from this site, so thought of sharing my gmat experience. I may get flak for discussing other sites here, but I am here to present my experience.
Got back from test center an hour ago. Scored better than I ever got in any of the practice test.
Breakdown:
T - 740/98%
Q - 50/95%
V - 40/90%
Day before test (that is, yesterday):
Took half day off from work. I spent 6 hours doing maths from the intellectual discussions section on gmatclub.
Then I spent 3 hours on the SC section of gmatclub doing sc/cr.
This is the most I have ever studied in one day. Most of my study was 1-3 hours per day 3-4 days a week. No wonder it took me a year to prepare.
During the test:
I lost all hope when the 33th question in Quant asked to find radius, given area of a circle. Given that the test is adaptive, I really thought I was doing so bad that the software had decided to find out if I knew the basics before handing out a 400 to me.
The Quant questions were pretty basic, most of them ... x+y>1, is x < 1/2? sort of thing. I was surprised to see so many questions of same format, and these types of questions were my weakest point. Could never learn how to pick the right numbers. PS questions were pretty basic without any twist, Only few DS questions had twists.
Verbal was challenging from the very first one, and I was exhausted by about 30th question.
I did get one SC repeated verbatim from SC section here.
The longest time period was the 3 seconds when I clicked yes to accept the score, and it shows blank screen for about 3 seconds before showing the score screen.
Practice tests:
In the last week, all I did was one test every day, total of 8 tests. I think this is what helped me most to score what I did. Kaplan gmat cd depressed me every time I attepted a test from it. I got 570 in the one I did 2 days ago!
The GMATPrep tests are the closest to actual GMAT test. Both exams are very good. I got 710 and 730 in the two tests, which was the most I ever scored on a practice test.
Preparation:
I did not study from any book at all. I think I have
OG 9ed, but never opened it.
My whole preparation was from 3 websites - gmatclub, testmagic and score top. For each section I started from first discussion (by date) and tried to do as many as I could. Intellectual discussions section is the only one I could not finish to date.
For each section of GMAT, here is breakdown of the sites I used:
SC - testmagic and then gmatclub
CR - testmagic; gmatclub in last week
RC - score top and then testmagic
PS/DS - exclusively from intellectual discussions section of Gmatclub
- Testmagic has impressive discussions of SC.
- Score top has a lot of RC, didnt find it useful for anything else for preparation.
- there is no other site with level of discussions that are available at intellectual discussions section of gmatclub PS/DS
Right now, I am just glad that I won't have to study for gmat again.