I just took my GMAT today, and I finished with 760 (Q50 V42). I am really happy to be finally over with it and not have to retake it! I am pretty surprised to score a better percentile in verbal than in quantitative tough.
For those who might be interested, my profile is:
French.
3.78 GPA from a top University in Asia, major in Quantitative Finance.
Apply to a couple of Master of Finance and Financial Economics in Europe (UK, France and Spain).
No work experience besides an internship.
I basically studied for the GMAT from early December to end of January, for a bit less than 2 months. I started with the Princeton Review to get a good understanding of the different types of questions and the techniques. However, I feel that not everything is applicable. Notably, their advices on RC was not helpful for me, as I prefer to read carefully first and then answer the questions fast. Also, their "Joe Bloggs" advice does not apply if you really want to answer difficult questions: it is still better to solve them the old-fashioned way. However, the Pinceton review is quite helpful for AWA and SC.
Afterwards, I just trained everyday with OG12 as well as the additional
OG review for verbal and quant.
Since I am from a quant background, I started with verbal and gave the verbal practice a headstart of 2 weeks. Afterwards, I just practiced verbal and quant on alternate days (during verbal days, I practiced all types of verbal, and during quant days I practiced all types of quant). Basically, I tried to do about 30 questions a day. I read the solutions for the questions I got wrong and tried to understand and learn from there.
For the practice tests, here are my results in chronological order:
Princeton review 1 650
GMATprep1 760
Princeton review 2 640
GMATprep2 770
I do not advise taking the Princeton review online test. The questions are pretty different from actual GMAT questions, and it might affect you negatively on the GMAT. There is even one instance where I had a SC question on the princeton review test which uses "in that", whereas OG12 states in the correction to one of the SC question that "in that" is old-fashioned and overly formal, and should not be used. It seems that the more I practiced on
OG, the less well I fared on the princeton review test because the reasoning behind the questions is not exactly the same.
If you have any question don't hesitate to ask, and good luck to all of you who still have to take the test!