Hello forum,
New to GMAT prep using GMAT Club.
I apologize if this has been asked/answered, I did try to find the answer using search.
The questions that are organised in quant/verbal and by topic and difficulty, are these Official Guide questions, or GMATClub created questions?
If they are OG questions from previous, is there any benefit to using the current OG as well?
There is also a paid version of GMAT with forum quizzes, are there any benefits to buying this versus working through the free question directory? I don't mind buying it I'm just not sure how to fully use GMATclub.
I recently took GMAT and scored very low using a much hyped prep company that will go un-named, so I'm feeling pretty battered and bruised. Towards the last few days of my limited time frame (2 months total) I was doing OG questions and using GMAT club for solutions and found this to be the most high yield for learning. The solutions posted by bunuel, karishma etc were very helpful to my learning of answering GMAT questions. I found myself getting MUCH more of the easy/low medium questions wrong, and was getting most of the medium high/hard questions correct. Explain THAT paradox GMAC! Argh.
Interestingly on my first attempt at GMAT I got an IR 8 and 100% on RC (with no study for those) but fell down on SC and CR (the stuff I studied the most) and got the easier questions wrong on quant, and the medium/high questions correct based on the ESR (spending way less time than the average for the correct ones, and much longer on the easier ones). This tells me at least in my mind that my study method was not ideal, and that I'm missing something. Of course silly mistakes on arithmetic (my weakest) factor into it, but for some reason I find questions classified as "easy" harder to tackle than those classified as medium and hard. I found the official guide questions were v different from the prep company questions.
I found bb's post about q44 level scoring and what to focus on so I will try that, and I think the best thing is to focus on is official questions, hence the question I posted at the top. I will also use the handsome mod nightblade's advice post about CR and Powerscore/blind review.
I'm doing something wrong and it's hard when you don't know what you don't know.
Background GPA 4.0, native speaker, avid reader (not that that helped with SC!!!!), technical science-y background
Thank you for your advice, criticisms and whatever else. At this point I'll take what I can get!
I should add, I didn't do any OG verbal prep, all my SC and CR prep was with the prep company. I learned the theory and thought I had a solid grasp of the theory (and made copious notes) and was meeting and crushing the benchmarks of some of their tests but sadly this wasn't enough. Not having a go at the prep company, I learned a lot from them and benefited greatly from a theory standpoint, I just want to improve my verbal and quant accuracy now. My strategy now is to only use official guide questions to practice, maybe that's not the best way? Open to suggestions!