Background: Italian Male, 28 years old, working full time in strategy consulting.
I started preparing alone in December, but really switched on in January. I firstly used all the OG materials, and after having read them I did some practice exams. It became quite clear that they were not enough, so I purchased the
Manhattan Prep Quant book. While really well written, I found it to be not deep enough in certain areas: I felt like I was missing some tips, tricks, etc.
My main weak area was quant: on data insight I floated between 80 and 85, while on verbal I was constantly on 85-87, but with quant I simply couldn't find the gear, being stuck at 76-77. coming from an engineering background this was quite tough to take, so I focused my preparation only there.
After giving some mocks where I scored consistently 635, I gave my test and scored 635. It may be good for my applications in Europe, but I knew I could do better, since I had an 81 in QR and 78 in DI.
So I tried
TargetTestPrep and I must say that I should've gone with it since the beginning. The one thing it does really well is focusing both on key concepts and on most common question types. This way I've been able to really have a confident strategy for the vast majority of questions, something that in the first attempt I didn't have. My weak areas were probability and number properties, so I nearly exhausted all of the questions on TTP on the topic.
As I said, to be able to identify immediately the best strategy was a game changer, as on test day it let me save huge amounts of time to double check calculation and also skip some really tough questions. The one thing it doesn't have is a lot of variety among questions: you'll likely find similar questions but with different numbers. This is however useful in my opinion, as it really help you to cement your understanding, but I must say that including more different questions could be helpful.
The main insight I could share is: should I do it again, how would I do it? The answer is:
- start by reading the OG to have an understanding of where you are
- do some quick practice on OG questions to fix the question structure
- do a mock test to assess your baseline
- use TTP and focus on my weakest areas, in terms of QR, DI, or Verbal
- for each topic, study it from the ground up (even if you feel you know it, read it anyways as there are lots of tips that could save you time)
- keep the
error log and deep dive on topics on which you have difficulties.
Gmat is tough, but the main thing I learned is that you MUST KEEP WORKING. You will have some tough moments: in my second mock I scored 545, down from 585 of the first mock. Head down, keep studying and you will make it. It's a mental test, not a knowledge test. Keep your calm, get over the valley of despair where you feel like you're not making any improvement (because until you really pass a certain mark, you will not see significant improvements), and believe in yourself.