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risys82
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risys82
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risys82
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^^^ duly noted. I really appreciate your input. Once again, congrats on the outstanding score!
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risys82
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DAYNE

I have the same materials you have and want to know what did you use for Data sufficiency?

I studied solely from OG and MGMAT. Believe me, on the entire exam data sufficiency was my biggest pain point. I know this is probably not the magical answer you are looking for, but I approached data sufficiency the same way I approached PS.

1) Gain understanding of fundamentals
2) Do test questions from OG and MGMAT to identify common ways that the test makers might try to trick you. (e.g. squares of numbers can be either positive or negative).
3) Rinse and repeat
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Hi,
Great score and great discussion on the insights of the test. I have quite a few questions which are more or less answered in answering other people’s questions. But one Q? How did you manage to study 5 hrs everyday after say 14-16 hrs of work? Or are you a student?
Please reply.
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risys82
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vaivish1723
Hi,
Great score and great discussion on the insights of the test. I have quite a few questions which are more or less answered in answering other people’s questions. But one Q? How did you manage to study 5 hrs everyday after say 14-16 hrs of work? Or are you a student?
Please reply.

The last time I worked 14-16 hour days was when I was working in public accounting. Thank god I am not doing that anymore. I now work a private industry job, and although there are some times when I still have to work past midnight, generally I can get out before 8pm. Normally I'll take another hour or two to eat dinner, shower, or do other errands, so that puts me at 9pm or 10pm. Studying for 4-6 hours will put me at 2am to 4am. Then I will have 4 hours to sleep before getting up for work the next day, which is plenty because I generally only need 2 hours of sleep per night. This isn't as bad as back when I was in college, where for all of my finals weeks, I would not sleep for the entire duration of finals week (generally only lasted from maybe Mon-Wed, sometimes Thursday), other than a few 20 minute power naps here and there. There's no way I could pull that kind of lifestyle off now that I'm older.

If you are working 14-16 hour days then I feel for you. You could try to squeeze in an hour or two each day and more time on days off (if you get any). However, I don't think the average person studying for the GMATs works those brutal hours.
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Very inspiring and great debrief.

Congratulations and wish you all the best with your application process !
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rbriscoe
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Thanks for such a detailed download....your story is inspriring!
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fivezero7
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congrats for the great improvement :)
one small query from my side, is the Kaplan material suggested?
i am planning to go through OG12, manhattan SC, powerscore CR bible and the 1000 SC-CR-RC documents over the next two months.
will these be sufficient?
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How did you find the actual gmat compared to the gmat prep exams? Were they significantly harder?
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Congrats!!! I really enjoy reading your devriefing and the development. I'm in similar path, not smart although I think you're humble, but needing to improve 200 points. I hope to score high 600's but I have limitation as a non-native English speaker. I have the hardest time with reading comprehension and SC...my biggest weakness is the timing as you had talked about. I am hoping you can shed some light that somehow can breakdown my hung up. I have struggle with the flow and the staying with the passage due to lack of context understanding. Maybe I'm a bit ADHD as well...I went through all of the OG 11 and 12 and kaplan reading passage...along with Manhattan reading book. Not sure what else there's to do. I can see improvement with SC but so disappointed with RC. I hope you can help me see if there's something in the concept I'm missing here.

Congrats again...I hope to give you good news!!!
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First of all my CONGRATS! Very inspiring post!
Tell me please how would you rate verbal part of MGMAT practice tests? Did you find it difficult and have time problems or your problems finished with the beginning of verbal part?
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Very impressive improvement. I had a similar experience, although your score is higher than mine. Congrats on your test performance!
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Thanks for your feedback and congratulations!!!

Now I konw waht else I have to do to get 700+, but I also have a question, I have just taken my GMAT and I got 530 43Q/20V, and I only have one month more to apply for European universities, do u think I should take the test again or better prepare more I wait next year.

And congrats again, you are the best!!!
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inspiring story ... thanks for the debrief...
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fivezero7
congrats for the great improvement :)
one small query from my side, is the Kaplan material suggested?
i am planning to go through OG12, manhattan SC, powerscore CR bible and the 1000 SC-CR-RC documents over the next two months.
will these be sufficient?

Only you can answer that question for yourself, since I don't know where you're at in your studies. If your math is where you want it to be, and you wish to focus mostly on verbal, then I believe those materials should be all you probably really need to succeed.
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burnttwinky
How did you find the actual gmat compared to the gmat prep exams? Were they significantly harder?

You will hear different opinions on this, but my opinion is that they are the same. Sometimes you just get lucky with questions you know how to answer vs those that stump you, as the tests are randomly generated. That is probably where the variation comes from as far as people complaining that the real thing was so much harder than the GMATPrep. I would say that the real test is the same difficulty as the difficulty of GMATPrep the FIRST time you take it.
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pkayla2000
Congrats!!! I really enjoy reading your devriefing and the development. I'm in similar path, not smart although I think you're humble, but needing to improve 200 points. I hope to score high 600's but I have limitation as a non-native English speaker. I have the hardest time with reading comprehension and SC...my biggest weakness is the timing as you had talked about. I am hoping you can shed some light that somehow can breakdown my hung up. I have struggle with the flow and the staying with the passage due to lack of context understanding. Maybe I'm a bit ADHD as well...I went through all of the OG 11 and 12 and kaplan reading passage...along with Manhattan reading book. Not sure what else there's to do. I can see improvement with SC but so disappointed with RC. I hope you can help me see if there's something in the concept I'm missing here.

Congrats again...I hope to give you good news!!!

Hi, you likely don't have ADHD if you are basing it on the difficulty of the reading comprehension. I am a native speaker, and I'm sure other native speaker can also agree with me that the verbal section on the GMAT is no walk in the park. The passages are dry enough to have anyone claim ADHD after reading them :) I know others have recommended reading novels and other such literature to improve reading comprehension skills. Although any reading is bound to improve your comprehension a little bit, I feel that that would be a waste of time, and inefficient way to improve reading comprehension. If you want to improve reading comprehension that would help with the GMAT, I would advocate skimming the abstracts of scientific research papers, or reading the newspaper, or magazines such as Newsweek, Businessweek, etc. Read for comprehension, and then afterwards try to explain to yourself what the main points of the article were.

I myself hate to read literary works, especially fiction. In fact, the last time I read a work of fiction was probably over a decade ago, in high school. However, I love to read newspapers, magazines such as the ones mentioned above, etc. Therefore, I did not have many problems with the reading comprehension section.
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Hey, congratulations! Well done! And thanks for your post, I found it really encouraging! I agree with you that study patterns differ, so I guess the tools used would differ from person...All the best with B-School
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