Hey guys,
I am new to this forum. to introduce myself: i am patrick studiying in uk since this year (before 2 years in germany), who wants to get in top master program in europe (mba admission wont consider because i have barely work experience) and is apparently in need of your advise. i recently took the gmat and scored 640 (q42, v36) after 4-5 weeks of intensive preperation (approx. 5-6 hours a day). altough english is not my native tongue i practiced a lot more for the quant part. unfortunately, i started to learn with kaplan stuff and later (about 2-3 weeks before the exam) bought mgmat realizing that kaplan was a relative waste of time. on test day i was a bit shocked about my performance on quant ... i think did quite good on the first few questions but was then confronted with some question that put me off since i realizied that i had problems to find a direct conceptual approach to the problem. since this moment i was getting into a habit of guessing and additionally it appeared that i wasnt able to solve relatively easy questions any more, there was a word problem with car dealer and i was absolutely sure about the algebra but must have done mistakes within my calculations and so my solution on the noteboard didnt show up on the screen.

after my prep tests and the real one, i think my weaknesses are: i sometimes need very long to grasp a problem that looks unusual or new to me, i am lacking a conceptual and fast approach, i think i am stronger in artihmetic than in algebra (altough i also had trouble with some arithmetic questions on the test day)

here is what i used for my preperation:

mgmat word problems (4th)
mgmat equations (3rd)
mgmat number properties (3rd)
mgmat sc (4th)
kaplan premier 2009
kaplan 800
off review 12th and quant

CATs:
1 from Prep Software
5 MGMAT
3 Kaplan from CD


i want to improve my score to 700+. i will buy all the other mgmat books. what do you think about buying manhattan review quant additionally? I also thought to buy some non-gmat books to practice rc in general.

I would really appreciate advise from you guys!!!!!

what is a word problem, can you please give an example of this??