Gmat Prep - Hit A Wall!!

Hi guys,

I'm a new member here and currently prepping for the GMAT test due in 2 months exactly. I just wanted to thank you all for the insightful posts and the sense of encouragement around these forums. Great motivation!

Admittedly, the last week has been very rough as I've started to realise how much of a gap I have to bridge for the quant section if I were to have any chance of getting my desired score (700+).

A bit of background - I'm 24 and currently working in investment consulting for a large asset management house. I'm interested in pursuing a MSc Finance overseas (I'm Australian) or wait a few years and apply for top MBA programs in the UK/US. A 700+ score is a prerequisite as my undergraduate GPA is rather low (about 3.0) even though my experience to date has been solid.

Now on to my preparation:

In the 2 months thus far, I have completed Kaplan Premier, OG Verbal Review, and the Manhattan SC book. Granted my attention has largely been focused on verbal but my scores in that area have been quite steady (consistently hitting 85 - 90%). Sure, I feel like improvements can still be made, particularly in SC but I'm not too worried about verbal given that I've still got time and 6 test papers to complete. So hopefully with more practice I can get even better.

Now the problem area = Quant. I am very good with the basic PS questions but as the questions get harder my brain just can't handle it. At the moment, I'm going through the OG quant review and scored 72% on 176 questions (keep in mind I timed myself with 2 mins per question, made silly mistakes on quite a few, and didn't guess on the questions I had no clue about... so in actual fact I probably could raise that score to 80% without too much trouble). The worry I have has to do with the last 1/5 of the problem solving section. Out of 35 questions, I got half wrong! And the worst part is, as I went through these wrong answers, the explanations in the book made very little sense to me. And even after understanding the logic, I just can't fathom being able to think creatively enough to solve these difficult problems under exam condition. Data sufficiency is perhaps even worse. I haven't completed that section yet but expect a score around 50 - 60% as that's the score I got on the Kaplan Premiere book. My weaknesses in quant centres around trigonometry, combinatorics and probability, and number properties. My arithmetic skills in dealing with exponents also need to be addressed.

In terms of planning for the next 2 months, I will finish off the OG quant review, Kaplan Advanced, do 8 test papers, go through Manhattan number properties book, and do all 800 questions in OG12. On top of that, I've hired the services of a GMAT tutor (guy who scored 780 and is a Maths Phd) to help me with maths every week. Basically, I'm targeting those tutoring sessions as a forum to discuss the maths topics I find most difficult and get help dealing with at least the medium to hard level questions.

Overall, I think my study habits are pretty good. I can stick to schedules and be disciplined, plus I'm tracking all my wrong answers and analysing patterns on different types of questions. I also actively learn from my mistakes which are in my opinion one of the best approaches.

I would really appreciate people's comments/suggestion on how I should best tackle the medium to hard quant questions over the next 8 weeks. I'm targeting a GMAT score of 750 but know that I probably won't get there, that said, even a score over 700 would be a reasonable outcome.

Some specific questions I hope others can answer:
- Is the last 1/5 of the OG quant section really that difficult? Does it imply that assuming I don't improve at all over the next 2 months I will not hit 48-49 (>80 percentile) in quant on the actual exam?
- What good posts/links are there on data sufficiency?
- Is the approach of targeting my weak topics in quant individually a good approach or should I spend my time dealing with broad subjects and hope I won't see too many of those questions on the exam?
- And this will sound desperate but what are my chances of getting a 750, 700 in 2 months time? Where do I stand? Should I postpone the thing?
- Any ideas on how I can best utilise a tutor as I've never really had one before for anything?
- What other materials would help me with improving quant? Perhaps the GMAT Club tests...

I will keep updating this thread and keep you posted with my progress with journal entries every few days. I really hope with the help of GMAT Club I can conquer the beast!