I have never posted before, but wanted to write in and thank everyone on these forums for providing the feedback and motivation to keep me going on my GMAT studies. I took the test this Saturday and got a 760 (Q48, V46), which blew all of my goals and expectations out of the water. I would have been happy with anything over 700, and considering that I work full time I thought even that was a stretch. Fortunately for me, DC rush hour traffic is terrible and it was easier to pull over at a Starbucks and study than fight 495 the thirty miles back to my home.
Here is a list of my practice tests and a few notes about them.
11/21/09 Kaplan basic: 570 (Q39, V32) Paper based, before I began studying
12/6/09 Manhattan #1: 700 (Q44, V40) First exam that I took after studying the fundamentals
12/12/09 Manhattan #2: 690 (Q44, V39)
12/19/09 Manhattan #3: 690 (Q47, V37)
1/2/10 Manhattan #4: 680 (Q44, V 38)
1/9/10 Manhattan #5: 640 (Q44, V34) Off day, in a lousy mood and really shouldn’t have taken
1/16/10 Manhattan #6: 740 (Q47, V44) The controversial mnht #6: everyone scores higher on this one.
1/18/10
OG 1: 750 (Q49, V44)
1/19/10 Kaplan online #1: 690 (Q49, V38)
1/20/10 Kaplan #2: 730 (didn’t record Q,V)
1/22/10
OG #2: 710 (didn’t record Q, V)
1/23/10 Actual GMAT: 760 (Q48, V46) WHOOOO DOGGIES! (I’m southern, can’t ya tell?)
My thoughts on these: Manhattan Q is a lot harder than the real thing! Taking all 6 of them first definitely helped me boost my Q up as far as I could hope for it to go. I didn’t think Kaplan was as bad as most people on this forum have stated. Their scoring algorithm is a little different, but the questions themselves are pretty in-line with the test. And the
OG questions from the book overlap with the questions on their CATs, something to keep in mind when evaluating your scores. Did you really do that well, or did you just remember the answers from when you did your error logs after reading the book?
Books: I used Kaplan Premiere Online 2007 first to get a grasp of the test as a whole. I then studied Manhattan SC (by far the best purchase I made) to get a stronger grasp on verbal. I bought the Kaplan Verbal book, but it really didn’t do me much good after Premiere and Manhattan SC. Kaplan Quant, however, was a great for me, as my Q was a lot lower than my V throughout my studying. I also used OG11 (awesome) and Princeton 1012 (not so much).
Things to keep in mind:
1) Don’t drag your studying out too long! Your motivation will wane the more weekends you miss out on going to bars with your friends so you can study. Look at the dip in my scores between 12/6, after I finished the fundamentals, and my starting up again after the holidays on 1/9.
2) Endurance! A lot of my mistakes came in clusters towards the end of the exam. Not because they were harder questions, really, but because I was thinking about what to eat for dinner, how tired of reading I was and how many wrong had I gotten so far. Take a practice test a day the week before your test to train yourself to sit in one place for a four hour test.
That’s it for me guys, thanks for all your help!