Using Official GMAT material (OG,Guides,PT 1 to 6, PQ 1 & 2)

Hi bb!

For verbal concepts and strategies, I have access to the following:
1. MGMAT SC book
2. MGMAT CR book
3. MGMAT RC book
4. GMAT Club's Ultimate grammar book

For Quant concepts, I have access to my notes which I made during my GMAT prep. I had access to GREGMAT's paid program and developed decent notes from there. I believe the GRE and GMAT quant, although different in their difficulty levels and question format, share the same theoretical concepts. I am still looking for a place to learn quant strategies from.

Additionally, I have premium Magoosh subscription for GMAT but I am not finding it useful.

I am under the impression that the above theoretical material coupled with the aforementioned practice material should be enough for me to reach 710-730 level. Please correct me in case I am mistaken.

Finally, my question initial question was in relation utilizing all the official material in the best possible manner. Would be great if someone can help me with this.

Your final score depends on a couple things, and usually it doesn’t so much depend on the materials because everyone pretty much uses the same stuff and even if people don’t use the same stuff, it’s not like if you use books from company age you’re a winner and if you use a course from company be you’re the opposite. It be great if it was that easy, then we would not have to choose and pick, we could just go with books or a course from company A and be done 😇

Anyway, your final score really depends on your starting score and the effort you invest in to improving that starting score. The materials are important and they can definitely mess you up but if you are thinking and looking at your performance and improvement on a daily basis, then you should naturally realize that you’re spinning your wheels and not improving.

For example, I did not even use the official guide during my prep. It’s been a long time ago but I decided I didn’t have the time or money to buy one and didn’t even have it. I only had the two official tests and those were the only official questions I had access to. I don’t recommend this but it does illustrate the point that official questions are not some magical elixir. Plenty of people bombed their tests after solving thousands of questions.….

So, it’s a super easy answer. When you cover a chapter about weaken or strengthen or perhaps assumptions in your course or book, look up the topics of weaken or strengthen or assumptions in the official guides and work on the those. There’s no need to solve questions you haven’t learned strategist for. There’s also no need to solve 1000 questions about the week and strengthen. 10 questions should be a good number to give you a sense of where you stand. If you solve 10 questions of random difficulty meaning they are equally spread among easy medium hard, can you get eight or nine or 10 correct, you’re in a good spot. If you make more than two mistakes, I would suggest revisiting and understanding why you made the mistake. It could be for a completely different reason but it’s important to understand and it’s important to start working on eliminating it .

Anyway, you get the chapter done, you solve 10 questions from that topic. Done.

PS. The official guide does not come with topical question directory so for that reason we have created official guide error logs that you can search for. There’s one for every single edition and you can download them and sort them by topic and also difficulty. It’s a handy little feature we’ve added based on performance of other people so you know what difficulty of a question you were attempting. I would throw out and say that the difficulties probably not the most absolute perfect because it depends on other peoples level and therefore it could be a range.

Good luck.

Posted from my mobile device

Thanks for the heads up BB. This probably means that having a ton of official questions is basically of no use if one is not improving on his weakness.

The preparation should be focused on strengthening weaknesses and anyone wont gain a lot by practising the the questions aimlessly.

I will for sure explore the said feature at this website. Thanks for your help.

Yes, questions alone and not enough. At the same time, official questions are very helpful for verbal skills. It’s very hard to replicate the logic and approaches of the official questions and those nuance aspects become very important as you look to improve your verbal score. I have somehow managed to score 96th percentile in verbal but that was against the odds because I didn’t have many verbal questions to work with 🤷‍♂️ It’s definitely an interesting case study that I haven’t really wrapped my mind around or thought a whole lot about but it does illustrate that knowing the concepts is more important than solving thousands of official questions 😬

Posted from my mobile device

Hi DesiMozart,

Since you're just beginning your studies, it would be a good idea to take a FULL-LENGTH practice CAT Test; you can access 2 for free at www.mba.com (using that 1st free CAT/mock would be fine - and the CATs come with some additional practice materials). If you want to do a little studying first, so that you can familiarize yourself with the basic content and question types, then that's okay - but you shouldn't wait too long to take that initial CAT. That score will give us a good sense of your natural strengths and weaknesses and will help provide a basis for comparison as you continue to study. A FULL CAT takes about 3.5 hours to complete, so make sure that you've set aside enough time to take it in one sitting. Once you have that Score, you should report back here and we can discuss the results).

The OG books are great sources for practice questions, but they're not designed to teach you Tactics, patterns or the little 'secrets' behind the GMAT - for those, you'll need Course-oriented materials. As such, you might want to work on the OG a little later on in your studies.

I'd like to know a bit more about your timeline and goals:
1) What is your goal score?
2) When are you planning to take the GMAT?
3) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Apologies for the late reply.

1) My goal is to score 730
2) September 2022
3) I only want to apply to Indian School of Business. Will be applying in October or November.

I took official gmat practice 1 and scored 660 (Q49,V30)

From the analysis of the practice test, I had poor accuracy for SC (7 of 13 correct), DS (6 of 13 correct), CR (4 of 9 correct)

I took official gmat practice 1 and scored 660 (Q49,V30)

Here's someone I helped who went from an Official V31 to V40. There may be some tips you can leverage going forward (i.e. such as using a study buddy).

https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-online- ... 68599.html

Hi DesiMozart,

I've sent you a PM with some notes and additional questions.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Contact Rich at: Rich.C@empowergmat.com