strategy 770

started with the Magoosh videos. They had them on sale when I started including a 7-day money-back guarantee, so I took it. The videos they provide on their platform where incredibly helpful to build a foundation. I have a masters in physics already, so technically, the math was a no-brainer. However, it was still great to walk through all those little shortcuts and tricks that separate the GMAT from an actual math exam. In some parts, especially in the quant section I found that the videos are a bit too practical, focussing on solving the question, without understanding the underlying theory, e.g. by simply picking numbers. However, that was just my feeling, I can imagine that that approach works better for people without a strong math background. The verbal part of their videos was fantastic. English is my major language at work, but I never really learned it in the formalised, structured application, that you need for the the GMAT, so those videos were incredibly helpful. Even during my later work, I often went back to those and used them whenever other study material just brushed over certain questions without really explaining the grammatical structure.

I then took my first prep test from Kaplan and scored 760 (Q51,V44) in mid December. That would probably have been enough for the GMAT, but I enjoyed working on it, so I kept going. My wife was out of the country in December and January, so I had our place just for me to focus on my prep.

I worked through the Kaplan Premier 2015 and then the Kaplan 800 books. That kept me busy until just after christmas and in between I took a few prep tests:

Kaplan 1 750 (Q51,V44)
Veritas Free Test 780 (Q50,V47)
MGMAT Free Test 740 (Q50,V41)
Kaplan 2 760 (Q51,V45)
Economist 720 (Q50,V40)

I felt pretty confident before I took the Economist test and probably would have taken the real test by mid Jan, but the last one made me doubt again, so kept on going. I got the Veritas books from a friend and used the free videos lessons from their iPad app to study further. Those videos were again very helpful, because they focussed more on fast solving methods and strategic approaches than the Magoosh videos. While going through those books and videos during weekday evenings, I kept on doing prep tests on the weekends:

Kaplan 3 760 (Q51,V45)
Kaplan 4 740 (Q50,V42)
Kaplan 5 750 (Q51,V44)
For the first 6 weeks of my prep I used an Error log as that was recommended here. I guess it might be very helpful for some people out there, but for me it didn't turn out to be useful. Through the entire period that I worked on test exams and questions, I never had the feeling that I had systemic difficulties with one question type or the other, but most of my mistake were related to reading through the questions too quickly or not trying to pre-think before actually looking at the answers. Especially the latter technique was very helpful for me and I can only recommend it.
GMAT 770
The last weeks were really tough, because I hardly went out during that time and spent most of my evenings studying, so I am happy that it's finally over.