I am 35, have my mba, and was looking to score around a 680-720 for business phd schools.
i haven't touched math or grammar in nearly 14 years....
I bought and started off with
kaplan premier. read it three times. did the their tests, scored 580-640. found some online score estimator and it said i should score 640-680. was feeling great. that and i read all over the place about how many hours are needed for certain scores. i easily put in 800 hours. and like i said, i have a mba, own my own company. i am a native english speaker. (i am not an idiot?)
then, i read the
og 2015 and took it's pretest for both english and math. it was a different world. this was in august. took two pretests, bomber one and got a 620.
i read the
og probably 3 times as well.
i also read manhattan sentence correction. 3 times, and I read kaplan 800, which is a joke, leading to my official test.
I read a high school book on both algebra, and geometry. i also read "the only grammar book you will ever need".
I own a small business and was able to free up around 30 hours a week. i started with the grammar, algebra, and geometry book in feb. in april/may started with
kaplan premier. was out of the country in june. july i opened
og and my life changed. kind of feel like i wasted my time with kaplan. didn't research that book to well...
july aug sept oct, i read the
og guide 3 times, sentence correction 2 times, and k800 once. i probably have done thousands of practice questions, know some by heart.
i oddly slept really good and wasn't nervous about the test. well, i scored a 490 and have no clue how or why. i am sad... i even hired some math nut to help me with the problem areas in math. meet with him through setp-oct, twice a week. (go to craigslist and search on services, tutor and lessons, i paid some math major 12$ an hour., it helped)
so my question is to anyone who is reading this, do you have any similar stories? can you offer support. mainly i need to decide whether to take the test again by 11/25/14. Phd schools one needs to apply by Jan 1st, and if i can't improve my score to around 650-680 (at least), i will have to wait another year and a half. the other issue is that if i take it again in a month and have to cancel a score again, i don't want to end up with another cancelled score.
any advice would be appreciated...