Hi everybody

It's my first post here, but I've been reading the forum for a couple of months now and I wish I found it earlier since it looks like I'm far away from a good GMAT score and it's almost time of applications...

I've done a couple of prep tests and the results were definitely not what I expected, I'm still under the 500 score and after 6 months of study that's quite depressing! I have to admit that I didn't study like maniac, but it's still a good amount of hours overall - I would say I studied 10 hours a week, 5 hours after work in weekdays and 5 hours in weekends since Jan.

For the materials I followed my friends' suggestion and worked on the Princeton review... I know, it is considered almost crap here but unfortunately I realized that too late! I have done a good quantity of exercises on OG12, both quant and verbal, and decided to do a first test a month ago, ending up with a poor 490, 30Q 29Q. I then focused more on quant and followed the tips found here, reviewed maths on the Open Book, kept an error log and reviewed all the exercises. I was quite happy with my preparation, I reviewed some verbal and took another test last weekend.... The result was even worse than last month, 460 31Q 23V.

Now I can understand the drop in verbal but I was quite surprised of the 31Q, and in particular by the kind of errors I made. I knew exactly how to solve most the problems and I was fairly quick, I didn't find any one that I didn't know how to approach, but in most of them I did stupid errors such as plugging in difficult number or not plugging in at all, assuming something that wasn't actually mentioned in the question, giving partial answers, and doing easy fractions and ratios wrong.

I am not sure what to do now, should I start my preparation from scratch on different books? Or Should I work more on strategies? Perhaps both?! I'm just confused at the moment, I hope you can help!