Thanks all for the congrats. Please do not hesitate to ask further questions if my answer aren't satisfying, I know what it is!
What I did differently: i studied smart over studying hard (OK I studied hard in a smart way). That means stop doing exercices just for the sake of doing them and really analyzing your weakenesses to fix them. That goes for both quant and verbal. More on that below
For QUANT:
Well like I said in my post I knew I could achieve this score on my first shot but screwed up, mostly due to stress I think. In under to reduce my stress level, I made sure I was as ready as I could be.
Between the 2 test I did:
- 3 full
Manhattan Prep test: great to speed up your quant + the explanations are simply awesome and really helped me in grasping further concepts.
- 3-4 Gmat PREP, QUANT only. I made a document with my mistakes and did them again to make sure I'd be able to easily do them afterward
- I really went through my errors in a more serious manner. The first time around I was doing exercices to do exercise to be like, yeah I did 40 exercices today. This time, I really went through my mistakes to make sure I -understood- how to resolve it next time. The thing is, with stress and 2 minutse per problem, you basically have no time to screw around trying to get to know how to resolve a particular type of problem. There's not that many different types of problems on the gmat (exposants, algebra, combinatorics, rates/speed, geometry, ...) so just make sure that you know how to get to an answer for all of them, for most of the questions.
VERBAL:
- In my two weeks I only used Manhattan SC and did some of the 1000 SC questions. I also used the mistakes file of a friend (50 questions more or else) that were all quite hard. When I got the Manhattan manual, I compared my errors on the OG12 with the matrix available at the end of the guide to check where I was doing most of my mistake + with the problems numbers at each section. It turns out most (50%+) of my mistakes were on parallelism and pronouns. I worked on that. Just doing that really helped me in improving my SC skills.
- I need to say that apart from my SC skills, I maybe did 15-20 mistakes on the 350-400 questions on RC and CR in OG12, and about 1-2 errors on the prep tests, so I didn't have any issues with that (the manhattan tests gave me a hard time though).
- BE carefull with the GMAT Prep software: since its verbal question bank is not that big, it screws up your score big time after 2-3 retest (my thoughts!)
MORE:
Here's a bit more on what I used/did, I'll try to update my first post but I'm kinda in a rush to finish my applications + life (christmas gifts, work, studies, ...)
What I'd do differently: LESS exercices and MORE exercice explanations. Study smart and get to know: HOW to solve problems and WHAT are your flaws. I did too many exercices "just to do exercices". It helped (a lot) in the beginning but if you are scoring 600-700 right now, you need to get down to the concepts and make sure you really understand them well + you can make up ways to answer gmat questions. So yeah, exercices to get to 600+, then a further study of concepts and exercice explanations.
GUIDES I used and score on a 5 pts scale
- Kaplan 800 (3/5): nothing more really I was a bit disappointed by that guide
- Princeton Review (4/5): Good starter to get basic concepts. I read it once and then used it for reference
- OG12: exerices
- Prep test: I can't remember how many I did. 10+ for sure. Gmat Prep 2005, 2006 + Powerprep, Manhattan Preps. I redid a lot the gmat preps quant part and I kept having 50% of new problems everytime..
- Manhattan SC 5/5
- This forum and testmagic: for explanations as well as for exercices. great resources. pitfall: I spent too much time checking out how people were studying which freaked me out on my first test i think.