Hi there.
I have been following GMAT club for almost 2.5 months now and have taken a lot of help from discussions, question banks and GMAT preparation guides from people who have cracked their dream scores. Even though my preparation and experience may not be very different from what you have already seen here, I think it still may be of help to people who are just starting off.
My preparation has been broadly in 4 stages.
1.
The goal setting: This is when I started reading GMAT experiences and approach for getting scores in range of 720-760. I had finalized that I will not be applying to any schools if I get a score below 720. I believe this is the phase where there was no other place like GMATClub. The sheer varied experiences and prep strats helped me form an aggregate view in my mind. I finalized my sources of preparation for the upcoming 2.5 months in this phase. I used Manahattan number properties and sentence correction,
Powerscore CR bible, Manhattan mock tests, Advanced Quants from Manhattan, and last but not the least,
OG. I also took the 26 quant and 6 verbal exams subscription from gmatclub. Hats off to the quants test in particular.
2.
The pivoting process: This is when I took a mock test from official GMAT Prep software. Got a 650. But yeah, I wasnt too disturbed, coz I knew these kind of exams require conditioning to think in an agile manner and sadly most of our corporate jobs do not. So conditioning the mind was very important. This helped me realize I need to focus a lot on conditioning so that in the more serious phase of preparation, my scores on mock would actually be close to what I could potentially achieve.
3.
The conditioning: I started and ended all the books mentioned above - twice (except the CR bible, which was wayyy to elaborate). For making sure that I slowly moved towards the mental agility target I had set, I made sure I did one gmat club quant test in every 2 days for sure - no matter what. It was so effective that by the time exam day arrived I was pretty sure of a 49-50 score. These
gmat club tests are a thing of beauty. For English, I have historically performed well in comprehension, so RC took the lowest priority (I nevertheless did practice 10 questions in every 3 days at least from
OG). Since
OG has a good mix of passages I did almost all of my preparation for RC using
OG.
Sentence correction and critical reasoning took the best of efforts from me to get to a confident position before exam day. For quants I think only the last 30 questions of
OG are sufficient. I did not even do the DS questions from
OG4.
The re-pivoting and slogging: then I took one more
OG test and scored 710. Well "some progress" i thought. From here on it was more serious prep. I gave 70 percent of my time learning concepts from sentence correction and CR. I also took more time to review my mocks and practice tests , no matter how much time it took (especially SC and CR).
5.
The fine-tuning and trade offs - This is where I became more aware of the timing constraints and started to apply timing strategies. Stuff like what happens when I spend 3 minutes more on RC, how do I adjust that time. What happens if I get a tough question in the middle of quant section, how do I take decisions in seconds to adjust my pace and so on. I found the gmat club math book at this stage. And I made sure I went through it once before exam.
So summary of my prep:
RC -
OGSC - Manhattan SC
CR -
Powerscore CR Bible
Quant -
OG, Manhattan
Advanced quant and Number properties, Gmat club forums and tests
IR- Not until 2 days before test
AWA - not until the day before test
Mock test scores:
OG Mock 1 - 650
Manhattan 1 - 620
Manhattan 2 - 690
OG Test 2 - 710 (Q50, V37)
Manhattan 3 - 740 (Q46, V45)
OG test 3 - 740 (Q49, V41)
OG test 4 - 730 (Q49, V40)
Actual 740 (Q50, V41)
I knew as soon as I finished the quant I should be hitting at least 49. Verbal was also fine and I expected my verbal score to be above 38 at least. Glad to get a score which hit my initial target that I set 3 months ago.
Thanks a lot to everyone here at GMAT for all the help. Special thanks to makers of GMAT math tests.
Edit: Just got my official scores as well as the ESR. Updated my AWA score. Seems like in sentence correction i made some costly mistakes. I got a 45 in CR, 44 in RC and a 38 in SC.