Hustled my way to 740 on 2nd attempt- 100 points Increase

First of all, thank you so much gmatclub.com and all the great members here including by reading whose post I gained immensely and some of whom have been generous enough to reply to any query I had and supported me through thick and thin. For those of you who haven't read my story of the first attempt , here's the link that I had a bad GMAT last time because of my own stupidity.
bombed-the-gmat-thanks-to-a-hangover-angry-at-myself-132128.html

Fortunately, I am happy this time around as I managed to lap up a 740. I told myself today before stepping out for the exam, 'I will kill the GMAT this time” and by god's grace, it happened!

My thoughts :

I think this time I did this well because I had the experience of the last time. On the last attempt, I had seen quite a few questions from coordinate geometry and inequalities, areas that I wasn't confident about. So right after my first attempt, I started working on all these areas.

I think that verbal section on the GMAT is quite challenging for non-native speakers. The GMAT RCs were quite dense and the sentence correction questions were again not very easy.

Reading comprehension
For reading comprehension , I didn’t follow the “skimming” technique because I would invariably get most of the questions in the passage wrong if I didn’t understand the passage. I experimented with a couple of techniques using the OG12 RC(26 passages) and Aristotle RCs(30 passages). So by the time I had finished practicing around 50 passages, I knew what worked for me(reading the passage carefully,overlooking the confusing details) and what doesn't(skimming didn't work)

Sentence Correction
Sentence correction was again an area that I use to initially struggle in. I knew that if I could do a sentence correction question in less than a minute, i could spend more time in reading comprehension. So SC became the prime target for me. I worked on it a lot using SC Grail and Manhattan SC. I realized that the questions I used to get wrong were mostly because I didn’t pay attention to the non-underlined part. Reading the non-underlined part is also very important and I started ensuring that I understand the meaning of the sentence properly.

The hype around meaning in sentence correction
That brings to the topic of “meaning in SC” that the test prep companies have been saying has become very important. That is absolute bullshit I think, just a ploy to be different. Most of the meaning changes in a sentence happens because of modifiers or comparison issues in the sentence. Now if you already know how to check for the right modifier and comparison , why the hell do you need to worry about meaning. Isn’t it very logical that when there will be a comparison error, there will be a meaning error in the sentence ? All the test prep companies, I think, are just bored and looking for ways to find something new to catch the fancy of test takers.

Which material to use ?
I primarily relied on Manhattangmat's and Aristotle Prep's material. I had access to a lot of other material including veritasprep and Kaplan but didn’t use them. Don't want to even talk about Princeton review's material.
I also used the gmatclub quant tests and found them really helpful for higher difficulty level quant questions

One thing I used was that I used one free practice test that all the test prep companies provide. Doing all the different tests gave me a better assessment as relying only on the Manhattangmat tests wasn’t proving very good because of their overtly tough questions.


Okay guys, I gotta wind up the post as I am throwing a party and gotta go. I will keep updating this post whenever I get time. If you have any questions, I would be glad to be of help. I can’t say that how much helpful has been everyone’s opinions, suggestions and motivation been on this website, so if I could do even a bit, that would be great