Working with OG

Hi, andih!

You know, my first strategy was exactly yours: finish all five Manhattan books and then tackle the OG Quant and then OG 12. After all, this process seemed okay for verbal. I finished Manhattan SC and Powerscore CR and then moved on to OG Verbal. The problem is that verbal was my strength at the time and the OG Verbal is too easy. Plus, English is my native language.

For math, though, things went terribly wrong. By the time I reached the OG, I forgot most of the lessons from the earlier quant books. I completely bombed the OG Quant. The first half was easy, but the majority of questions were too difficult after that. My second approached involved, among other things, re-reading the Manhattan math books and completing the assigned OG questions for each section. In others words, both were done at the same time. This way, I immediately reinforced the concepts from the guidebooks.

You might have two concerns with this approach: (1) you will run out of questions and have too much time left between the OG and the test, and (2) re-reading takes a lot of time.

Don't worry too much about (1). There's GMATClub tests or Jeff Sackmann's math sets to keep you busy. For (2), reading will actually be much quicker the second time - especially if you skip the end-of-chapter questions.

But that's just my opinion and experience. You could very well just jump into the OG books and everything will be alright. That approach has certainly worked well for many others. Make sure that you use both the OG Quant and OG Verbal, though.


Hope this helps.