I am a pretty avid distance runner and read my fair share of literature on the subject. The "experiment of one" quote comes from Dr. George Sheehan, an accomplished runner and physician and used to have a column in Runners World. His gist is to basically focus on the things that work for you. I added that parenthetical bit about the GMAT Prep exams. To my knowledge he had no opinion on GMAT preparation materials. So just keep all of this in mind when reading my debrief. Also I don't have any counterfactuals and I only took the test once. I have no plan on taking it again. So maybe I would have scored better if I took a CAT the day before the exam or studied over a longer period of time. There is no way to really tell.
Background I graduated from a decent (~60 in USNWR undergrad) university in 2012 with a 3.99 GPA. I've worked in some form of marketing/advertising since graduation and currently do strategy/analytics at an ad agency owned by one of those mega-holding companies. Born and raised in America, just the same as the last 4-5 generations of both sides of my family.
I decided to take the GMAT in mid October. Plan was to study intensively for a brief period rather than spread things out. I studied for about 2-3 hours a day on weekdays and pretty much 8-6pm on weekend days. You can squeeze in quite a bit of studying time if you work at it. I commute on the subway and always had some kind of prep book with me to study.
Materials I've always preferred to study on my own terms on my own schedule. I knew there was no shot I'd have the time or patience to take an in-person class. I would probably get frustrated by the pacing. I'm very self-motivated so it wasn't an issue getting me to focus. That meant I needed a huge amount of books.
Here is what I used
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OG 15
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OG Quant 15
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OG Verbal 15
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Manhattan Prep 9 Book Set
-Kaplan GMAT Book
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OG 13
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OG 13 Verbal
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OG 13 Quant
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Manhattan Prep GMAT Quat Advanced
-GMAT Question Pack
-GMAT Exam Pack
Kaplan was what I used first and was really useful. It doesn't seem to get a ton of love on this forum (probably because their tutors don't seem to have much of a forum presence) but I found it to be very helpful and was the first book I used. Great overview of the test and I thought it was stronger than
MGMAT on Verbal.
Manhattan GMAT 1-9 were pretty good. Very useful for quant. Verbal was kind of a mixed bag. SC was alright but I didn't get much of anything out of their CR or RC books. Though it is worth pointing out that I was already strong on both subjects so I didn't really need that much help.
OG books are indispensable. There was (as expected) a ton of overlap between 15 and 13 editions so its not crucial you get a past edition if you have 15. But it was very useful to get an idea of how the GMAT questions feel. I don't think this is something you can really get with Kaplan or
MGMAT. I mean
MGMAT kinda even admits this by linking their books so closely with the
OG.
I opened the
MGMAT Advanced Quant book, read like 10 pages and then shelved it. I only have so much time to study and all of the questions seemed super high level and like nothing I saw on GMAT Prep or in any of the
OG books. Maybe I am too dumb to reach these questions on prep exams but they seemed way too difficult. I understand the idea of doing harder problems so the real questions feel easier, but this seemed excessive.
GMAT question pack was great albeit somewhat expensive.
I also bought a
MGMAT test booklet to simulate testing conditions. If you are the kind of person who will be way more comfortable if they know exactly what taking the test will feel like, I suggest you buy one. It wasn't like there was this huge learning curve to use a fine-tipped marker on a laminated page, but it was nice to remove an unknown from the testing experience.
The Exam Pack was my most valuable purchase (though obviously I needed some test prep materials as well to prepare me for said Exam Pack). I took a GMAT CAT every Saturday for 4 weeks. I just did the 2 free ones and the 2 from the exam pack. I didn't do any Kaplan or
MGMAT tests because their questions seemed non-GMAT-y (and after taking the test I can confirm that they feel a bit off) and didn't want to get myself down with a low score on a Kaplan or
MGMAT test. I scored 740, 760, 740, and 750 on the official CATs. I think the 2 from the Exam Pack were tiny bit harder. But I can't stress how useful those tests were. They really helped me gauge where I stood and get a feel for the actual test.
Experience Rather uneventful. Subway cooperated, test center was easy to find, administrative people were nice. I also really liked how the essay came first. It was a great way to calm my nerves because you can take some time to get situated and gather your thoughts without worrying about wasting time. Argument was really flawed and I went to town on calling out this specific fact.
IR was weird but completely in line with GMAT Prep exams I guess. I scored an 8. I don't really know how the scoring works for this one but there were a few really difficult problems that I punted on. There may not be that high of a threshold for scores of 8.
The first quant question tripped me up and I spent ~3 minutes making sure my answer was correct (I think it was). Otherwise I'd say it was about as hard as some of the questions in the back of the
OG 15 books. There were a few questions I had no idea about but it didn't seem to terrible and I scored a 49Q. But granted maybe 49Q is bad for a lot of people given the fact that my percentile was relatively low.
Verbal was very easy for me. A lot of SC, but it seemed frontloaded and I had a decent bit of CR near the end. There was only one science-y RC passage (which I always find harder than the usual passage given its jargon I have no familiarity with) but it wasn't too bad. 44V.
My only advice is really to take a lot of GMAT Prep exams (well I mean you can only take 4, but try to take those 4 before your actual exam) and get an idea of each question type's share of the total on verbal. I saw a ton of SC problems (and perhaps most of them were experimental) and it seemed like they vastly outnumbered CR questions.