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cicio
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GMAT 1: 740 Q49 V42
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Sammy599
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GMAT 1: 760 Q49 V44
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mariachi0204
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cicio
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Sammy599
Hi Cicio,

Congratulations on your great score and thank you for sharing your experiences. Do you mind sharing your experience on taking the practice CATs? Things like the accuracy of the CATs, their resemblance to the actual thing and what setting you took the exams in?

Sammy599

I've updated the post and included my practice scores. As you can see, my quant performance in Manhattan's exams was usually below my quant performance in GMAT Prep's exams. I found Manhattan's exams quite demoralizing. But that only made me practice harder and review more. I think that GMAT prep's exams are pretty accurate. I also think that Manhattan's exams are accurate, but the quant questions are harder to understand and process so my performance was not as strong. In general, I think that GMAT prep's quant questions are more straight forward than Manhattan's, especially at the beginning of the test. I would normally move very quickly through the first 5 quant questions in GMAT prep's exams. However, with Manhattan, even the second quant question would be pretty hard if I got the first one right.

Luckily my apartment building has a quiet study room where I could just go and take the practice exams without any distractions. I would recommend that you prepare and pack all your food for your practice exams just as you would in the real exam. Your goal here is to remove as many variables (food and break related) as possible and get used to a performance routine.

I hope that helps. Thanks for reading the post.
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cicio
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mariachi0204
Hi Cicio,

This is a very detailed and informative post. Thank you, on behalf of all aspiring test takers.

I have only recently started preparing for the GMAT, and I scored a 570 on my diagnostic test. I was quite disappointed with the result and I've been apprehensive ever since. It's been over a month since I gave the diagnostic test, but it's too early to take another CAT. Moreover, I'd like to save it for later, when I'm certain about my preparation.

It would be great if you could share your score on your diagnostic test as well, and also approximate the hours it took you to get from your initial score to a 740. Kudos on the test performance, by the way :)


mariachi0204 -

Great questions and thank you for reading the post.

I updated the post to include my practice test scores. I estimate that I spent about 200 hours to get to that score comfortably.

Here is how I arrived at that estimate:
It took me about 20 hours to go through all of Magoosh's practice questions: 450 questions * 2 min/question / 60 min/hr + 5 hrs for review of incorrect questions.
Then about 60 hours to go through the OG questions twice: 2* (approx 800 questions * 2 min/question / 60 min/hr) + 10 hrs for review of incorrect questions
About 40 hours to go through Magoosh's videos, Manhattan's guides (I moved through sections of these quickly because I had already learned many tricks through Magoosh), and the CR bible.
About 36 hours of practice tests: 9 practice tests * 4 hrs/test.
Another 36 hours to review all the practice tests: 9 practice tests * 4 hrs/test.
Running total: 192 hrs
Let's call it even and say 200 hrs.
This divided over 5 months comes out to slightly less than 10 hours per week, which seems reasonable since I would normally spend about an hour per day during week days and about 2-3 hours on Saturday and Sunday. This was a during a week where I didn't take a practice exam. Obviously if I took a practice exam in a given week, that would already be 4 hours spent just on taking the practice exam and the rest of the time reviewing.

I hope that helps.
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Keepushinalmosthere
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Wow! 740 is only 97th percentile?

I'm surprised. Thought it would be higher. Great job on the test!

I'm assuming you are happy with the score and not planning on testing again.
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mariachi0204
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Cicio,

Yes, that surely helped. Thanks again :)

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