I managed to score 700 with Q49/ V36 after 1 month of full-time/ around 3 months of part-time preparation. I am a non-native English speaker, business undergrad. degree.
I used the following preparation material:
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Manhattan GMAT Series (all 8 books for Quant/ Verbal)
- Manhattan Review (Quant/ Verbal)
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Manhattan GMAT CAT (5 out of 6)
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Manhattan GMAT Challenging Problems
- GMAT Prep Tests
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OG 12, Verbal Review 1st/ 2nd Edition, Quant Review 1st/ 2n Edition
- 4 GMAT Focus Online Tests
During my 3 months part-time preparation I spent around 10 hours a week for reviewing the
Manhattan GMAT series/ Manhattan Review. I started with the Manhattan Review but soon realized that it does not cover any topic in detail. The
Manhattan GMAT Series does a good job for most of the math topics. The only two topics that are not sufficiently covered from my point of view are Combinatorics/ Probabilities. With regards to verbal
Manhattan GMAT does a good job for SC and fair job for CR. I did not find the book for RC too helpful.
Before entering my 1 month full-time preparation I took the first GMAT Prep test, scoring a Q43/ V35. I spent 50% of the time on verbal and 50% of the time on math. I focused on the original GMAT sources and different CATs. All original GMAT sources were great for preparation purposes, simply because the questions are comparable to what you will see on test day.
The
Manhattan GMAT CATs are great for timing and analysis purposes. The review options allow you to pinpoint accurately where you are doing well and were not. This has helped me a lot in fine-tuning my timing. It is also perfect to determine, when to let go of a particular question. The overall scores were pretty accurate, however, it seems to be slightly too difficult for quant and slightly too easy for verbal - my verbal scores in CAT4/ CAT5 were definitely off in terms of scoring. Another issue is that even though questions are somewhat similar to original GMAT questions, a slight difference remains. I would hence recommend using a balanced blend of
Manhattan GMAT questions and questions from the original sources. The closer you get to the exam day the more I would skew the questions toward original sources.
The
Manhattan GMAT Challenging Problems question bank was not really helpful. Most questions are extremely difficult to solve. Moreover, the majority of questions do not really resemble real GMAT questions.
GMAT Prep and GMAT Focus are extremely accurate from my experience. They can be used as performance indicators for the actual test. Plus the questions are truly comparable to what you will see on test day in contrast to the
Manhattan GMAT CATs.
My different scores across CATs/ GMAT Focus were:
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Manhattan GMAT CAT1: Q45, V35, 660
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Manhattan GMAT CAT2: Q43, V35, 640
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Manhattan GMAT CAT3: Q48, V35, 680
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Manhattan GMAT CAT4: Q44, V40, 700
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Manhattan GMAT CAT5: Q47, V39, 700
- GMAT Prep 2 Test: Q49, V36, 700
- 1. GMAT Focus Test: 42 - 48
- 2. GMAT Focus Test: 41 - 47
- 3. GMAT Focus Test: 43 - 49
- 4. GMAT Focus Test: 43 - 49
In conclusion I think there are many good sources available to ensure a proper preparation. Verbal proved to be extremely tricky for me. Especially RC has been somewhat disillusioning. I would not see how to improve performance of RC without massive additional time spent on English vocabulary. I would also assume that there is a 'natural' barrier for non-native speakers that is hard to cross - without spending hefty amounts of time on idioms, vocabulary, etc. Math in contrast can be trained well, and the performance seems to be directly related to the time spent on preparation.