It is over, I took the exam yesterday and I am so happy. I got a 740 with Q49 V42. I am particularly pleased with the Verbal since I am not a native speaker and almost all of my education was in a language other than English.
Here is how I prepared:
I spent 2 months preparing. I bought all the official guides and I did all the exercises. I also bought the
Manhattan GMAT books which I used in parallel with the
OG. I think that the entire Manhattan series is great, not only the SC. What I like about
MGMAT is that they discuss the concepts that you need to master. The
OG has lots of useful examples but very little written text about the underlying concepts. I felt like
MGMAT completed the
OG really nicely. Also the
MGMAT CATs are quite good, the quant is too hard but on the other hand that is a good exercise. I scored 690, 740, 730 and 690 in the four
MGMAT tests that I took. I also did Powerprep (690,710) and GMAT Prep (700,730)
When I started to prepare with
MGMAT and
OG I felt that my verbal score improved rapidly but I was frustrated by the fact that my quant score was not improving. I bought access to all the challenges from this forum and I found them really useful. They are more difficult than the real thing and I started of with results around 55th percentile but in the last 8 challenges I was averaging 86th. In the end I did one challenge per day and I feel like they really helped me to lift my quant score another notch.
The day before the test I had to come into the office and work for 6 hours on my day off. When I came home I did a bit of SC and at 9pm I put the books down and watched Nacho Libre with my wife
. During the exam I felt like I was doing well all along. When I got my score I screamed out and I scared the living crap out of the poor guy who worked in the test center (the two of us were the only ones there). I apologized got my score and went home with a big smile.
Finally I wish everyone on this forum the best of luck and I hope to see some of you at Insead in January 2008