Hi all,
I scored 700 (m47, v39, AWA 4.5) and I have to say that this score belongs to GMAX.
I've taken their course and it's great - great structure of the lessons, great teachers, great material and great support from the team.
If I can use one best thing to illustrate, I will use the improvement I have made in the sentence correction: I started with 20% (i.e. 8 mistakes out of 10 questions!) and ended with 90%! All other parts of the course were very good as well (also learning and practicing the AWA)
It's was really hard to find the time to practice since as a Program Manager I was managing people and projects and work with people from all over the world and therefore work for very long hours. It's hard also because as a father to baby born I wanted to be with him as much as I could and the nights were fragmented...
After two months of struggles, I consulted Leanna and she very wisely helped me to rearrange my time so I will be able to practice the minimum of 2 hours everyday day.
Then, my son got sick and I had to stop learning for few weeks. Afterwards came a crisis in my work... all in all I had a break of about 3 months.
Keeping Leanna's advice("don't let your job interfere with your career") and concluding that if I continue like that, I will never be able to get the GMAT done, I quit and decided to devote one month to GMAT.
Since I was 3 months after the course had ended, I decided to view the GMAX online lessons (gmaxonline.com). This experience was great. I have never beleived in distance learning but now I realize that with the right people this can be great! The lessons are very well structured and taught very professionally. It's as if you were in the real class and even better.
I used GMAX's material and the following:
Scoretop - they have great questions in the VIP section. They also have great community.
Arco (ok)
Kaplan (not so good. Scores are not realistic - with almost the same ratio of mistakes you get 500+ in Kaplan and 700+ in GMATprep which is ALMOST EXATCLY as the real test).
Score800 5 test (ok+).
GMATprep - the best. Almost extactly as the real test - same UI, same style of questions, same difficulty lever, etc.). I scored 690 in the first and 750 (m50, v41) in the second test.
Regarding the test itself: the test center was great (Israel) although there were some noises from other offices in the floor - if you easily get distracted, put the seals from the begining - don't wait untill the noise comes. I have taken both of the breaks which were 10 minutes each.
Another most important thing - if you can, be cool. I was tensed and therefore couldn't concentrate in few questions in the math section.
Thank you GMAX!
Shimon