Hello everyone

I've been a silent spectator on this forum all this while when i've been preparing for the GMAT so now that it's over and done with, just thought i should post my strategies so others like me could also benefit from these:

Brief background - Engineer from India, WE - 3yrs in IT

Preparation Time - Started preparing in July so roughly 2 and a half months

Practice test scores

Kaplan Free test - 760
Princeton Free test - 740
Veritas Free Test - 710
MGMAT Free test - 740
GMAT Prep 1 - 770
GMAT Prep 2 - 760
GMAT Prep 1 (Retake) - 780
GMAT Prep 2 (Retake) - 780

Practice material used

Used the following for both quant and verbal - OG 10,11,12 & Kaplan Advanced

Additionally used the following material for verbal:

SC - Manhattan SC - The best book for SC as is universally acknowledged by all
- Aristotle SC Grail - Found this surprisingly useful for SC.Very very helpful!
After using both the books above, I was able to nail Sentence Correction questions easily.


CR - Powerscore CR Bible
- Some LSAT practice tests

RC - RC99 This book has a set of 99 passages across difficulty levels. Helped me improve my comprehension skill as I became familiar with passages from myriad areas. The passages and questions are quite on the lines of the those tested on the GMAT and the explanations are pretty good!

I was always depending on Verbal as my stronger area so worked very hard on improving the same.

Test Experience - Nerves really tend to get the better of you initially. Think I started badly in Quant but settled down after the 1st 8-10 questions. Had a candy bar during the break and started with verbal which went like a breeze. clicked on Report scores and was overjoyed to see a 760 on the screen

In case there are any specific queries would love to address those. Also in case any of you need any of the practice materials mentioned above just PM me.

Cheers!
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My 760 debrief

Congrats ! Good Luck with your apps.

So in your first post you report that made a 760 nice
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All things are possible to those who believe.

Congratulations..760 is awesome!
i envy your score of 46 in Verbal



I second his request..It would also be great if you could share the stuff [SC Grail & RC 99] since many havent heard about it !

You certainly did beat the gmat! congrats, and all the best for the application process.

AMAZING SCORE!!!!! Scary verbal score!
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It's a dawg eat dawg world.

Congrats dude

Posted from my mobile device
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Kudos if you like my post, thanks

congrats buddy

Thanks everyone.



Had done a review of these 2 books on a different forum....am copy pasting the same below:

Saw these two books mentioned on a some forum.....did a google search and found a soft copy of the SC Grail on scribd or esnips one of those sites....liked the book a lot so then bought the RC 99 book from their website

SC Grail- this book has 3 sections

1) Basic grammarreview - gives a brief overview of grammatical concepts such as parts of speech, etc.

2) Error types - pretty much the same errors as found in any other book but explained very crisply in bullet point format

3) More like a dos and dont's - when to use if or whether, when to use will or would, etc.

The best part about this book is that it is very crisp and to the point. At times I found Manhattan SC gets a bit too detailed which is not the case with this book..no complicated grammar concepts.....also the 3rd part is very useful as it summarises pretty much all the traps that are there on the GMAT. Not too mention it has one of the best idiom lists i have come across including correct and incorrect usages examples.....the only thing missing is practice questions which this book doesn't have but it does give you links to OG questions for each concept it explains

RC99 - One problem that I had with most RC practice passages (including some in the OGs) is that they ask u too many questions; sometimes as many as 5,6,7 questions per passage.....whereas on the GMAT u will most likely only get 3 questions per passage.....I got 3 passages with 3 questions each and 1 passage with 4 questions.....now to answer 6-7 questions one has to read the passage in much more detail than to answer 3-4 questions....so practicing from these passages kind of ruins your strategy....plus there aren't too many good passages available for practice anyway

The best thing I liked about RC99 book is that it only gives you an average of 3 questions per passage.....at the most some passages have 4 questions....the passages are graded across 3 difficulty levels of 33 passages each and pretty much cover every subject area tested on the GMAT....if u do these 99 passages I don't think u'll need any more practice for RC

Overall I found these 2 books to be very representative of the GMAT and would suggest you guys go through the same.....just do a google search and u'll probably find soft copies somewhere or just pm me

also go through their website - www aristotleprep com. It is a very unimpressive website but has some very useful content for Free download; I specially liked the document on tenses that they had put up which is as detailed a document as any that I have come across

Cheers!
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My 760 debrief

Great score !!

You already had good hold on verbal before your preparation or you have improved it.
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Fight for your dreams :For all those who fear from Verbal- lets give it a fight

Money Saved is the Money Earned

Jo Bole So Nihaal , Sat Shri Akaal

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Gmat test review :
670-to-710-a-long-journey-without-destination-still-happy-141642.html

As I had posted earlier I always fancied verbal as my strong point...its quant specially DS that I had a problem with....here are some specifics for each area on verbal:

SC - Was pretty comfortable with most grammar concepts which became even clearer after going through manhattan Sc book....what needed some finetuning was what works on the gmat and what doesn't...for example avoid 'being', and '-ing' in general, when to use 'would' and 'will', difference between 'due to' and 'because of', etc......this is where the SC Grail book came in very handy because it is very to-the-point amd summarises everything tested on the gmat beuatifully....would really recommend this to everyone

CR - The Powerscore bible is a good book to understand all the different question types....found the CR section on the Kaplan Advanced book to be very good specially some questions involving numbers which were rather tricky....also did some LSAT test papers but wouldn't really recommend these because some of the questions have very dubious answers which the GMAT will never give you.....and BTW i didn't get any bolded statement questions

RC - The only way to improve RC is by practicing more and more different types of passages....however make sure that the passages don't have too many questions because that will totally ruin your strategy in terms of timing.....Here I would highly recommend the RC99
book because it is very GMAt-like in terms of passages and question number and types.....Personally for me, since I have always been a voracious reader, RCs never became a big problem

Overall all the questions that I got on the actual test were pretty much similar to what I had done in the practice tests and the OGs....In fact I finished the verbal section in roughly 60 minutes and was kind of hoping for a 48-49.....but I guess I must have made some silly mistake somewhere

Let me know in case anyone has any specific queries about the above.

Cheers!
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My 760 debrief