Score from 520 to 700+

In general, you can assume the Manhattan quant to be a little more difficult than the acutal thing. Therefore, a 40/44 is not the worst place to start in terms of quant.
There are a couple of very adapt people on this forum when it comes to the quant section of the gmat, I can highly recommend to follow a member named "bunuel", he is like a wizard in quant.

Furthermore, if you are shooting for a 700 you are also going to adress you verbal score, I could offer the following tips:

1. Check out the SC specific threads on this forum, some of them (generally those with a lot of kudos) are very helpful

2. Listen to some of the videos on the YT chanel from Veritas, Magoosh and GmatNinja

3. Maybe check out the link in my signature, it adresses some verbal topics in general.

If any points are unclear please feel free to reach out.

All the best for your prep my friend,
Chris

You should pay close attention to your weaknesses

Here is a study plan for you

Best Books

For Concept Learning

Manhattan Quant Guides
Manhattan Verbal Guides
For CR: The Powerscore GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible
For RC: Aristotle RC Grail

For Practice

The Official Guide for GMAT 2015-18
The Official Guide for GMAT Quantitative Review 2015-18
The Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review 2015-18


You can start with Quant or Verbal which suits you. If you have started with Quant then Start with the Arithmetic but if started with verbal then start first with Sentence correction. One month for learning Quant concepts and one month for practicing question and same practice for Verbal. During you Practicing question don't forget to make an error log to track your weak areas after practice. Once you know your weak areas revise your Concepts related to those areas and do some more Practice. 6-8 CATs are enough for practice the real tests. Make your Stamina for sitting 3 hours in the test and don't study more than 2 hours in one sit and 4 hours per day

Top CATs for Practice

1. Official GMAC CATs
2. Manhattan CATs
3. Kaplan CATs
4. GMAT Club Quant CATs

Hi Queen199212,

Yes it's definitely possible. 2 months is good enough to improve your score. It’s a good thing you have taken a GMAT Mock once. You now know your weaknesses and work on them. If you are willing to study dedicatedly for that period, you are sure to achieve your goal. I think you need to solidify you base and adopt a proper technique to answer the questions. I believe you may benefit from taking a GMATPREP course. If you are willing, there are some great GMAT prep companies that can help you with your preparation.

In order to make an informed decision I would highly encourage you to go to their websites and try on their free trial and decide for yourself which one do you like better. You can try out free access to EmpowerGMAT, ExamPal and Optimus Prep as they have great reviews on GMATCLUB.

Also for verbal, I would highly encourage you to consider e-gmat verbal online or the e-gmat verbal live course. They are both amazing courses especially designed for non-natives. They offer almost 25% of their courses for free so you can try out their free trial to decide which one you want to go for. Plus the e-gmat Scholaranium which is included in both the courses is one of the best verbal practice tools in the market. You can easily track your progress in that you can identify your strengths and analyze and improve on your weak areas.

You can also try out the MGMAT guides they are phenomenal and cover the entire syllabus really well. MGMAT foundation of GMAT Quant anf foundation of GMAT verbal will particularly help you solidify your base. I must add that if you are particularly looking to discover and improve on your weak areas in Quant; a subscription to GMATCLUB tests is the best way to do that. They are indeed phenomenal and will not only pinpoint your weak areas but also help you improve on them. Please Note, that you should only do GMATCLUB tests once you have covered the base and looking to further enhance your concepts as GMATCLUB tests are a bit more difficult than the actual GMAT.

Further taking multiple mocks might help. Apart from the GMATPREP, Manhattan GMAT tests and Veritas Prep Tests in my experience have good verbal and Quant section and will certainly help you point out and improve your weak areas.

Further another advantage of taking many mocks is to build up your stamina. Apart from the GMATPREP tests, taking practise tests of any major GMATPREP company ought to do that.

I would also encourage you to purchase the latest version of OG and the verbal review for some great additional practice. Here is a link that will help you with your decision.

https://gmatclub.com/forum/best-gmat-ve ... ml?fl=menu

Lastly, you can check out a very interesting article by Mike McGarry from Magoosh detailing a 3 month study plan

https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/3-month-g ... -students/. You will find it very helpful as it gives out a study plan as per your needs.

Hope this helps. All the best.

Hi Queen199212,

First of all, I agree with prabsahi - interpret those first two CATs with a grain of salt and use an official GMAC practice test as your true baseline.

For the sake of this conversation, let's go ahead and assume that your GMAC test results would have been similar to your existing data. If so, then the short answer to your question is yes, you can definitely improve from a 520 to a 700+. As I was just telling someone else in another thread, I spent 6 years working at Veritas Prep and spoke with countless students who we helped achieve a nearly identical score increase (some were able to achieve that 700+ in two months, but of course, some took longer...or even less time). I've seen it done plenty times before, so why can't you do it too!

Regarding the two-month window you referenced, don’t think of your study sessions simply in terms of duration of time or number of problems answered. Make sure you’re thinking in terms of what you’ve learned, how you’re improving, and what you need to do next - not just booking library sessions and grinding out hours/problems.

If you're interested in checking us out, ORION offers a self-paced, computer-adaptive online course that personalized a study mission around your strengths and weaknesses (most of our students complete the program in two months, btw). The study mission is built to showcase multiple dimensions of each skill: once you’ve mastered the core content in level 1, you move on to proactive strategies in level 2 and the “think like the testmaker” ideology (which clues do they leave for you and which traps do they set for you?) in level 3. The goal is to make sure that you’re ready to think proactively and that you’ve seen several angles on each topic so that when you see the (n + 1)th version on test day you already have some action items in mind to get started.

Anyway, hope this information helps. Best of luck with your studies!

Ah I can relate to this. So I got a 590 on my first test because I completely screwed up on verbal. My last test was 720 (V went down from 40 in my second test to 39, but whatever). I had exactly 6 days of study days between my tests. Here is what I did during those 6 days:

1. I gave up on everything else. Picked up all GMAT books and did 100 verbal problems a day (30 of each kind + some random ones to make up the remaining 10)
2. I marked each type of question I got wrong AND why I got it wrong
3. I spent countless hours making sure I understood why the correct answer was correct and why my answer was wrong
4. I practiced
5. Most important of all, I got a private tutor You need someone to find out why you're doing something wrong and point you in the right direction. A private tutor can do exactly this

You should better focus on a solid study plan with sound strategy. Here is a study plan for you

Best Books

For Concept Learning

Manhattan Quant Guides
Manhattan Verbal Guides
For CR: The Powerscore GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible
For RC: Aristotle RC Grail

For Practice

The Official Guide for GMAT 2015-18
The Official Guide for GMAT Quantitative Review 2015-18
The Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review 2015-18

Best Courses (Budget)

1. Empower GMAT
2. Math Revolution (Only Math)
3. E-GMAT (Only Verbal)

You can start with Quant or Verbal which suits you. If you have started with Quant then Start with the Arithmetic but if started with verbal then start first with Sentence correction. One month for learning Quant concepts and one month for practicing question and same practice for Verbal. During you Practicing question don't forget to make an error log to track your weak areas after practice. Once you know your weak areas revise your Concepts related to those areas and do some more Practice. 6-8 CATs are enough for practice the real tests. Make your Stamina for sitting 3 hours in the test and don't study more than 2 hours in one sit and 4 hours per day

Top CATs for Practice

1. Official GMAC CATs
2. Manhattan CATs
3. Kaplan CATs
4. GMAT Club Quant CATs

Good Luck

its very much doable , i started with worst Q33 , V23 , I improved to Q47 now still struggling with Verbal but still on the way.

Queen199212 I believe you must be way ahead in your preparation now, considering your first post is now almost 1.5 months old. I believe that your issue has been well addressed. I would recommend you to take a GMAT official test, which would best indicate you of your progress.

All The Best....

As others have said, use the tests as general guidelines about your weaknesses but do take the official practice test. That's your guiding star. Use those to figure out where to deep dive.

Since you also just started you probably want to do a general overview of all topics. I found the Manhattan SC guide to be very useful. It breaks down pretty much every concept you will come across. You will need to review it several times because when you first read it some of the concepts will not stick. It is only after you make a given mistake and refer to that mistake against the specific part of the guide, that the fog will left and the concept will stick in your brain.