I started my preparation, 9 months ago unfortunately with the wrong study material. When I had decided to attempt for the GMAT, I had never known even the reference books and associated study material and never ever bothered to gather any relevant information, ever earlier. Two of my friends, excellent and brilliant gentlmen from the same college I graduated from and then pursuing MBA from ISB, Hyderabad, India suggested me the same thing, which indeed was something that wouldn't suit me at all. They told me that
OG was the Holy Bible for GMAT, that the test question style and language and the sentence framing structures are all very much in-tune with the
OG and so, I started out with the
OG 11 and that was my very first mistake.
I exhausted all verbal questions twice, moving from a pathetic strike-rate at about 40% of any number of attempted questions getting correct to just below 50% of them getting correct. I never got to realize what logic could help me get to the official answer and was dreading the verbal section badly. Nevertheless, I went out for
OG Verbal review to practise more questions hoping to find that pattern/framework that can help me develop a logic of attempting verbal questions. This was my second mistake.
I had exhausted half of
OG Verbal already when I came across this forum, excited and surfed during a break of 2 weeks when I noticed big-shots and top scorers suggesting Kaplan and Manhattan study materials to novices. My world was shattered. I had wasted more than 6 months already, without knowing the strategies and blindly exhausting the best of questions available. I never gave up though, learnt the strategies and practised some amount of Kaplan CR and
MGMAT SC and observed that
OG was far richer and sensible with questions as compared to both Kaplan and Manhattan materials. My friends seemed right and wrong at the same time.
However, I came back to
OG verbal with the strategies, finished it twice again within a month and half and noticed that my strike rate had improved something closer to 75%. That's when I took my first mock test with GMATPrep and eversince, my verbal has been in the range of 30 to 35 (best ever in four GMATPrep tests). I had also posted a topic discussing strike rate and relative scores.
Now, I need advice to get from early 30's range to late 40's range, almost a 10 to 15 points improvement. Materials I have exhausted,
OG 11 and
OG Verbal. Never tried kaplan and Manhattan stuff because they didn't seem as good and as rich as
OG. So practically I have only worked on
OG and am at 30's range, however, I have studied and always use the strategies provided by Kaplan for CR and Manhattan for SC. Anybody who has improved significantly on verbal can help me by suggesting a proper preparation strategy.