I decided to go to grad school last spring and planned to take the test today at the beginning of november and again in december if my score was bad. I was shooting for a 700. Due to a tough summer i didn't begin studying till the beginning of fall and my score improved from my first Kaplan test of 600 to a 740 on my actual GMAT. Here's what I did and what resources I used. I bought the OG book and did a lot of problems out of there, all the math and most of the verbal. My final scores was a 47 in Q and a 45 in V. Quant honestly never improved much but got more consistent cause i learned a lot of concepts and got them down pat. I was scoring around 45-49 in Q for my last couple practice tests. My verbal improved a lot because of doing a lot of sentence correction problems on THIS SITE AND LEARNING WHY THEY WERE WRONG, so THANK YOU GMAT CLUB FOR THE HELP. THANK YOU SO MUCH! your input was vital to my success. I also loved the veritas prep videos on sentence correction. Learning about applying logic to sentence correction helped my understand the concepts so much better. So in roughly a month and half of prep i raised my score 140 points, so guys if your dedicated you can do it. Keep at it, work hard, and study daily. I went over flash cards and problems every day for weeks. i did a practice test every week to see my progress. I also made a TON of flashcards and I can't emphasize this enough. a lot of stuff i never got tested on, i mean A LOT WAS NOT ON THE TEST. but what was I had seen before and knew how to tackle. THANKS AGAIN GUYS, my mom was crying and now I am applying to Columbia, NYU, and other schools I was afraid to apply to before. Any questions, just ask!
Also the KAPLAN course did not help me at all. I quit going after 2 sessions. Just my experience.