Test Date Verbal Quant Total Writing IR
----------- ------- ------- ------ -------- ---
Dec-2011 23 45 570 5 -
Dec-2014 34 46 640 6 2
Study material for 1st attempt:
-------------------------------
Quicker maths by Tyra for quant
Gmat Official guide for quant & verbal
Practice test : None
Prep time: 1 month (2 hours daily and 8 hours on weekends)
Study material for 1st attempt:
-------------------------------
E-GMAT self study Verbal course
Gmat Official guide for verbal only
Practice test : GMAT prep test(1) for quant only
A few GMATClub quizzes
Prep time: 2 months (3 hours daily and 6 hours on weekends)
During my first attempt,
OG was the only GMAT prep material that I used for preparation. When I finished my test I thought I felt short of practice. That's when I joined this forum.
I was glad that I took the right step by signing up for this forum. But I used this forum in a slightly different way. I would read math problems and solve them without using pen/paper.
There were days when I read both the math problems and solutions because I believed it could save a lot of my time. This approach taught me so much about GMAT like questions in so less time.
Apart from reading problems
, I hardly prepared for quant.
I then signed up for
E-GMAT course. I would recommend
E-gmat for sentence correction. I really liked this part of the course although my pre test and post test scores were all similar.
IR & CR sections are also of very good quality but I wonder to what extent they are representative of real GMAT questions. During the exam, there were multiple instances where I couldn't understand the CR para at all. English, all of a sudden, seemed alien to me. So, CR tackling strategies did not prove to be useful to me in this case
The strangest thing I ever did was skipping IR section completely because I didn't prepare for it (I don't like taking stress in exam and this section of the exam looked stressful to me due to lack of preparation. So accepted the defeat
.
Real GMAT is the only full test that I ever took and for Quant during 2nd attempt, I didn't prep for more than 12 hours.
Yet I improved my score by 70 points and the improvement could be attributed to 'understanding the basics of GMAT quant & Verbal'.
My suggestion:
You have seen my scores and improvement and the prep materials used. You can draw your own inferences/conclusions.
I am of the opinion that if you are thorough with the basics, you don't have to take practice tests and waste time (2 practice tests should be enough otherwise). Also, you don't need any study material apart from Official guides.
However each person is different and hence do what works best for you.