760 (50Q 42V): Never scored 700+ on MGMAT CATs

Wanted to share my 8-month experience with the GMAT - hopefully this motivates those who are unhappy with their MGMAT practice CAT scores:

Before any prep
Completely new to the GMAT, I decided to take GMAT Prep Exam 1 in September 2016 just to get a sense of my strengths + weaknesses:

1. GMAT Prep 1 (09/2016) - NO SCORE. Ran out of time in Quant and gave up after 15 questions. Same story with Verbal. Quit the test and as soon as I stumbled upon a lengthy Reading Comprehension passage.

Looking back, I am glad this happened to me. It made me realize I will need to take the GMAT seriously. The CR questions were particularly new and confusing; overall timing was a huge weakness of mine.

Kaplan
Wanting to tackle CR questions first, I started my prep with Kaplan's Verbal Workbook. To this day, I still prefer MGMAT's approach to CR (more to come on this) over Kaplan's approach. Kaplan's Verbal Workbook is an okay resource for practice questions in general, but I would not recommend it to someone looking to improve CR specifically.

I also purchased Kaplan's Math Workbook, which I must say is only useful if you need to go back to the basics of quant. Don't bother getting this book if you are solid on the basics - I finished the book in about a week and did not derive much value from it.

Looking for more practice, I then used Kaplan GMAT Premier solely for its online quiz bank and practice CATs. I did all the medium+hard level questions in the online bank, and I took 2 practice CATs ahead of my actual GMAT. Strangely enough, I have found the difficulty level of these questions to be rather similar to that of the actual exam. Contrary to a lot of posts here, I would consider getting Kaplan GMAT Premier if you have exhausted all your practice questions and are looking for an extra resource to leverage. I did not read the Kaplan GMAT Premier Textbook, so I can't comment on the quality of the book itself. Last thing I'll say on Kaplan GMAT Premier is that it comes with 5 CATs (Computer Adaptive Tests) and 1 paper exam. GMAT paper exams in general are not really helpful since the GMAT is an adaptive test. Know that if you are looking to purchase Kaplan GMAT Premier, you will really only get 5 (not 6) useful practice tests out of it.

2. Kaplan CAT 1 (2/18/17) - 710 (49Q, 38V, 6IR, did not do AWA)

MGMAT
I was still having problems with CR and timing (particularly with the quant section) at this point. Keen on crossing the 750+ threshold, I decided to sign up for a Manhattan GMAT online course to get to my desired score. I'm sure every person has his/her own experience with the MGMAT course, but here are my key takeaways:

1) The MGMAT CAT quant difficulty level is much higher than that in the actual exam. If you are taking MGMAT CATs and freaking out over your quant score, stop worrying. You will likely score much higher on the actual GMAT quant, so just focus on learning the subject matter to the best of your ability.

2) All the quant strategy guides are a must read if you are taking the course, but in my opinion, the Number Properties guide really is the best of them all. Put simply, the Number Properties question type is plentiful on the actual exam, and I would not have obtained my quant score of 50 without this guide. The GMAT is all about thinking logically and using quick tricks wherever possible - MGMAT's Number Properties guide really knocks it out of the park in this regard.

3) The verbal strategy guides are also very useful, but I have found the CR strategy guide to best most effective in raising my verbal score. While I am still not an expert at CR, MGMAT's CR guide lays out an extremely effective framework for approaching each CR question type. It takes practice to get used to this framework, but if you are struggling in CR like I was, consider adopting MGMAT's strategy to boost your verbal score.

4) If you are having timing issues, MGMAT provides really helpful strategies to help you overcome this obstacle. It might not seem obvious at first (especially to those new to the GMAT), but timing is so important in this test that I could write an entirely separate post on this topic. I'm sure any GMAT course will have effective timing strategies to implement on test day, so consider taking a course in general if this is problem for you.

5) Take your MGMAT's CAT scores with a grain of salt. Most importantly, do not get beat down by your MGMAT CAT scores if you are not performing as well as you'd like (remember that the MGMAT quant section is much tougher than that in the actual exam). If you feel like your scores on MGMAT CATs are not truly reflective of your ability, then I would recommend taking a GMAT Prep Exam, which is truly the best scoring proxy out there, as demonstrated below:

3. MGMAT CAT 1 (3/4/17) - 670 (44Q, 37V, did not do essay or IR)
4. MGMAT CAT 2 (4/2/17) - 640 (42Q, 35V, IR-3.94, AWA not graded)
5. MGMAT CAT 3 (4/4/17) - 680 (46Q, 36V, IR-4.5, did not do essay)
6. Kaplan CAT 2 (4/29/17) - 720 (49Q, 40V, IR-7, did not do essay)
7. GMAT Prep 2 (5/2/17) - 730 (48Q, 42V, IR-5, AWA not graded)

Official GMAT (5/3/17) - 760 (50Q, 42V, IR-6, AWA-5.5)

Moral of my story? Even if you can't break 700 on the MGMAT CATs, you can still get a 760 on the actual GMAT if you put your mind to it. If I can do it, so can you.