Got my 700...

My 5 month GMAT journey has come to its end. Although 5 months is a small time compared to my age (32 years).. it feels like I have been studying for GMAT my whole life.

I got a score of 700 (yup exactly) - Quant: 45 (77 percentile) and Verbal 41 (93 percentile).

My practice scores were the following:-

Princeton Review practice 1: 590 (Q: 38, V: 32)
I found that the verbal section of the PR tests were pretty much useless. I am pretty confident about my verbal abilities and I disagreed with 50% of their answers. I gave up on the useless PR practice tests after this.

MGMAT Practice 1: 720 (here I majorly cheated by using the pause button liberally for the quantitative section)

GMATPrep-1: 760
Quant: 48, Verbal: 45

GMATPrep-2: 720
Quant: 48, Verbal: 40

After reinstall...

GMATPrep-3: 710
Quant: 48, Verbal: 40

GMATPrep-1: 770
Quant: 49, Verbal: 47

These are the materials I used for my study:
1> Official guide 11
2> Official guide supplements - Quant and verbal
3> Manhattan GMAT books - all 8 of them
4> Sets
5> Princeton review
6> Kaplan

I found the Princeton review and Kaplan books pretty much useless. Unfortunately I wasted 2 or 3 weeks on these. Time that would have been better used on "Sets" or the OG supplements.

My recommended plan of study is to start with the Manhattan GMAT books. Get your basics right from there. At this point my speed was really pathetic. I used to be able to solve 22 quant problems and 25 verbal problems in the allocated time.

To improve the speed you can start with the "Sets" intermixed with studying the easier problems in the OG. I solved 16 sets. After that I attacked the Official guides with gusto. By the end of those my speed had improved remarkably.

Oh btw... I personally feel GMATPreps give you inflated scores. The idiots over at ETS include OG questions in the GMATPrep... especially in the verbal secton. Even on my very first GMATPrep I saw 4 or 5 questions from the OG. If you charge me $250 per attempt then atleast give me some fresh questions.

In the actual test today my quantitative section went pretty much as expected. Stupid mistakes galore (I realized during the 10 minute break that I had made plenty of dumb mistakes). With the verbal section I started of confidently. Things went really well till question number 18. I was actually ahead of time at this point And baaaam there I started getting really hard questions. I wasted a lot of time on these hard questions. I also had one 100 line RC with 4 questions. By the time q25 arrived I realized that I had little time left. I rushed through the remaining questions not feeling really confident about some tricky CRs.

I probably underperformed in the actual GMAT. But I do not have the patience, nor the time to struggle with this monster again. Anyways I think that 700 should be enough to get the adcoms to look at my essays and recommendations for the part-time programs at Kellogg and University of Chicago.