Hi all, I just scored a 735 with Q90, just wanted to shed some light on what materials I used to study quant, and some of the strategies I used to get to that score.
Being a humanities major, Verbal and DI came relatively easy, but my quant score was in the 57th percentile on my first attempt.
The FREE Manhattan review foundations of gmat math book is possibly the BEST quant resource out there. I highly recommend it. If you start with a quant score less than 81, go through the entire book, including all the easy questions. You are likely missing foundational skills that no amount of drilling hard questions will solve. Every time you get a question wrong, read the explanation, and redo the question from scratch until you get it correct.
For additional help, check GMAT club for sectional guides. If you are absolutely helpless in a certain section (Combinatorics for me), you can ask AI, but be very careful it is teaching you the correct methods. It's most helpful when have the answer, but don't understand the steps.
Once you start finishing these chapters, you can begin drilling those sections on GMAT club quizzes. I did not see any difference between linear and adaptive, in fact I preferred choosing difficulties over being assigned them, so I kept it on linear for the most part. You should be getting near flawless on the easier questions, and 80% on the harder questions. Difficulty tags can be incorrect, so don't pay too much attention to them.
I only paid for GMAT club quizzes and the official mocks 3-4.
If you are really struggling with certain sections, I would recommend the free 5 day TTP trial. Time that for a 5 day period where you can study the absolute most you can to get the most out of them.
If you are only studying quant, you should take mocks every 1 or 2 weeks to get a view of your progress. Wrong answers on mocks are your biggest signals as to which sections need more practice. I do not recommend GMAT club mocks as a reliable benchmark for your score, I scored ~80 points less on it than on official mocks. If you feel as though you would perform better with a different section ordering, test these now. I found that my last section is always stronger than the first 2, so I went with V, DI, Q on my final exam.
While studying for quant, you should continue practicing V and DI questions, especially DS. I did 2 or 3 of each subsection every day to avoid getting rusty.
On the final test day, I got a bit lucky.
I made a mistake on the first question, and immediately realized it after I submitted it. I believe I was given easier questions for the rest of the section as a result. During review, I corrected that one, and two more, and found that I had scored a perfect score. I don't think attempting this on purpose is a good idea, but you shouldn't stress too much about early mistakes, so long as you fix them.
Thanks a ton to GMAT club and Bunuel, the gmat World Cup event and free Gmat quiz awards were super helpful.