New Member - In Need of Some Basic Advice - Where to Start

MGMAT first. The books will actually refer you to questions in the OG's

he4dhuntr,

Honestly, you might not even need all of those books.

The Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension portions of the verbal section should be a walk in the park for you, given that you did indeed score in the 99 percentile on the LSAT. However, the Sentence Correction portion might require you to brush on some grammar principles that the GMAC considers as "correct" or "preferable." The best way to tackle this is to grab the MGMAT Sentence Correction. Moreover, if you expect that SC may be more of a burden, then I suggest that you grab the PowerScore Sentence Correction Bible and begin with that. Reason being is that the bible breaks down important grammar concepts down to the core, as well as being very thorough, well-written, and easy-to-understand.

Now with the Quant portion. As you may already know, there's a unique question type (comprising 1/3 of the quant portion) that troubles many GMAT test-takers: DATA SUFFICIENCY. Because of DS's uniqueness and unfamiliarity, the only way for you to perform well on this section on test day is to practice. Although I've taken and performed well in Calc 1-3, Lin Algebra, Diff Eqns, I still had a tough time getting used to the DS format.

I have all the books that you mentioned and the book I least liked was Kaplan Premier. I skimmed and read like 5 pages of the quant portion and threw it back on the shelf. The strategies and concepts were too basic after I did half the MGMAT books. However, I did find the Kaplan strategy on RC to be OK.

I would suggest two book lists given your background.

1) 3 OGs, 5 MGMAT Math books, MGMAT SC (PowerScore Bible as optional)
2) 3 OGs, Jeff Sackmann's Total GMAT Math, MGMAT SC (Bible as optional)

Note on Jeff Sackmann's. I absolutely love this book. You can do a little research around the forums to see the good reviews for yourself. The only bad thing is that it's a little pricey for a PDF file ($50). I had to take it to my local Kinkos to print and bind a hard copy version but I found it to be a good investment. The content of his book gets straight to the point and is very easy to follow.

One more thing, buy at least ONE MGMAT book as this will allow you access to access 6 MGMAT CATs, which are arguably the best indicator of your performance next to GMATPrep.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Take my advice with a grain of salt, a large one in fact, but if the GMAT test you took was a CAT (computer-based) then maybe you felt it was hard because you were doing really well. I wouldn't lose confidence because of that one test, and if you can, I think you should go back and complete it and judge yourself based on that score.

Hey guys,

Just wanted to update you all that I took my GMAT yesterday (about 2 month of studying) and scored a 760 (Q 50, V 42)!! Super happy with the score. I'll be writing a debrief when I get my official scores back in about 20 days.

Thanks for all the help! This forum has definitely been a great resource. I've already added my scores to the GMAT Score Estimator as well.

P.S. I ended up going through all the quant MGMAT books and they were very helpful. I didn't read the RC and CR books due to already having those topics pretty pat from my LSAT studying. I read through the SC from cover to cover, but didn't do any of the problems in it due to lack of time. Tests, I took the two GMAT Preps, a couple of MGMAT CATs and one Kaplan Online 2010 CAT. Anyway, I'll put it all in more detail in my debrief.

Cheers,

WOW - that's 99th percentile. Congratulations!!! Definitley good move not studying for months
You may want to document it a bit sooner than later - you will be amazed how much you will forget but definitely up to you.

Fantastic job!

Ya, I've already written my debrief down so that everything was fresh in my mind. I'm just going to add in the AWA stuff when I get my scores back and then post it up on the forums. It's pretty lengthy, I may have gone overboard with excitement We'll see.

Cheers,