The culmination of 2 months of prep: 760!

It's over! After the longest two months of my life I finally took the GMAT today and scored a respectable 760 (Q48/V48).

I initially started studying for the GMAT a couple years ago in my previous job, at which point I signed up for a Manhattan GMAT class and purchased all the books through them. I ultimately did not take the GMAT since I got an amazing job and decided to put B-school on the back burner, but I'm now back on the B-school track and started studying for the GMAT in earnest at the beginning of March. What's interesting is that when I was taking the Manhattan course I felt pretty inadequate because a group class will be inherently less focused on your individual needs, but while prepping by myself (reading books and using online resources) I felt a lot more confident in my abilities. As a result I think courses are overrated: get the right materials and tailor the studying to your own needs. Only you know how you learn best.

The materials I used:

• OG 13th edition
• Quantitative Review 2nd edition
• Verbal Review 2nd edition
• GMAT Prep Now Improvement Chart (uploaded it to Google Drive and converted it into a Google Sheet so that I could access it from any computer)
• Manhattan GMAT for basically everything
• PowerScore CR Bible for Critical Reasoning
• Beat the GMAT daily email study guide

The MGMAT books are generally very high quality and highly recommended, but their CR book is worthless. I recall using it during my first round of studying and I could never figure out how to properly solve CR questions because it relies so much on diagramming. What you end up doing is reading the passage, trying to summarize it into a set of diagrams and/or shorthand summaries (wasting 30+ seconds in the process), and then having to run each answer choice through your hard-to-read summary. The instructors were also pretty weak in this area in general, overusing the term "out of scope" without really explaining why. I was thoroughly impressed with the PowerScore CR Bible, which broke down each question type into very manageable pieces and gave fantastic strategies for attacking them. I don't think I could have broken 720/730 without this book, since CR was my weakest Verbal section.

Anyway, let's get down to my strategy. After going through all the material (which took a month of ~2 hours a night on weekdays and ~6 hours a day on weekends), I quickly realized that my Verbal was significantly stronger than Quant: I got 75% of the math questions in the OG right, whereas my verbal hit rate was 95%. I had two options at this point: focus on quant, in order to increase my quant score, or focus on verbal in order to ensure it stays high. I chose the former, since my quant scores on the two GMATPrep practice tests I took were 48 and 47. I figured if I could raise this score and keep my verbal at 46/47 I would get a good score. So I spent the next two weeks drilling quant for a couple hours a day, and then two weeks before my test date I sat down to do a Veritas practice test.

This is when I realized I had made a mistake.

My previous two GMATPrep exams were taken after I finished studying math (710 Q48/V40) and after I finished studying verbal (750 Q47/V46). I was expecting my Veritas test to give me a 750 or higher, but I was shocked to end up with a 710... Q47/V40. Not only had my quant studying not helped my quant score, but my verbal score suffered significantly due to the lack of focus on that section. I had only two weeks left to the exam and was very deflated at this point, but I made two crucial realizations:

• No matter how much I drilled quant, the 2-minute limit meant that I was unlikely to break 48/49, and any more focus on quant would be wasted time for me. Some people might be able to increase their quant score by consistent practice, but I think the nature of the 2-minute limit meant that I had reached my ceiling, at least without several more months of practice. My time was thus much better used in drilling the hell out of verbal to ensure I ace it on the exam
• The most important realization, however, was don't trust any questions not created by GMAC. While the Veritas test had decent quant questions, their verbal questions threw me off quite a bit. The sentence correction questions tested topics GMAC didn't test, and their critical reasoning questions were often confusingly phrased

For the last two weeks, I basically scoured the GMATClub forums for every single GMATPrep 700+ level verbal question I could find. I ignored any and all questions that weren't official questions because I did not want to waste my time solving problems that wouldn't show up on the test, and as it turns out, it's incredibly difficult to write questions the way GMAC writes them. For all the flak they get, I think their verbal questions are actually incredibly fair, and other prep companies tend to rely on tricks and gotchas instead of solid verbal reasoning in writing their most difficult questions. I think I solved a couple hundred verbal questions over the last two weeks, with one or two days devoted to quant (just enough to ensure my score didn't drop). Two days before the exam (Saturday) I solved every reading comprehension question in the Verbal Review 2nd Edition, and then solved a number of 600-700 difficulty quant questions from the GMATClub forum. My strategy for quant was ensuring I aced the 600 level questions to ensure that my score was at least a 47.

One day before the exam I did absolutely nothing except watch TV and lounge around the house. Healthy food, no beer/whiskey, lots of water. Got lots of sleep in the 3 days before my test, although this morning I woke up early and couldn't go back to sleep due to nerves.

So, how did the test go? For quant I felt myself doing really well in the beginning (I spent extra time making sure I answered the first 10 questions correctly), but I then had to make up time during the rest of the section. I felt the questions getting progressively easier in the mid/late section, so I worried that my quant score would suffer, but every time I got an easy question I told myself it was a question that GMAC was testing for future use, which made me feel better. For verbal I spent extra time on each question double checking that I picked the right answer, and every 5 questions or so I would check how much time I had left. I fell behind at several points, but I made up for it during RC sections, since after reading the passage you can generally answer the questions in less than 1 minute each. Eventually I had 3 minutes left with 3 questions left to solve, so I had to rush through those, but 2 of them were SC which is my strength, so I think I finished strong.

And that's that. The thing that I think helped me the most was realizing what my strength was (verbal) and what my weakness was (quant), and ensuring that I did as well as possible on verbal. I got lucky in the sense that each point on verbal is worth more overall points than a point on quant, but I do believe that focusing on your strength is just as important as focusing on your weaknesses, especially if you feel like you are unlikely to improve performance on your weakness. Going through a couple hundred verbal questions in the final two weeks put me in a very comfortable place going into the exam, as the verbal section didn't scare me at all.

Anyway, I'm off to a nice dinner and some heavy drinking. Happy to answer any questions once I'm sober again.