Thanks for the wishes!!
I'd love to share my experiences with you guys; here you go:
I booked for the GMAT in march end, leaving me with exactly 3 months to prepare. After going through the posts of some PG veterans, I thought the time duration to be sufficient for the preparation. I work in a software company (heard that before?
yeah, right!!) which leaves me with 2 hours on weekdays and 3-4 hours on weekends to study, to give you an idea of how much time I had at my disposal. Now, I'd say that I hardly used half of this time for preparation due to work pressures at times or plain laziness on my part.
Also, I come from an engineering background (heard that before too? you bet!!) so I did not had much trouble with maths and so my whole preparation was more inclined towards verbal (sad that I managed just 39
).
Before I started actual preparation, I formulated a high level plan as to how I would go about it. First come the books; I used the following books for preparation:
1. Kaplan Premier Edition
2. OG 11
3. Manhattan SC 2003 ed.
4. OG 10 (verbal only)
5. Kaplan 800
6. OG Quant
7. Kaplan Verbal
Thought of doing
OG Verbal also, but dropped it because of time constraints. I would recommend that book; have heard a lot about it.
I believe that the above books are sufficient to manage a good score (>=760).
Now about the tests that I took:
1. Kaplan Higher Score CD tests (4): available with Kaplan Premier Edition; scored 590, 620, 640, and 730 in that order. The tests are
way above the actual GMAT level, so don't get bogged down by the score. The CD has some separate sectional tests too, but most of the Qs in them were from different Kaplan books listed above.
2. Kaplan online free test (1): good test; scored 710.
3. Princeton online free test(1): a bit easy; but scored 710 again.
4. PowerPrep: 2 tests are available but I attempted only 1; I had completed OG 11 and OG 10 by then, and many of the questions in the test were from these books; got 770.
5. Finally, the biggies: GMATPrep (2): from GMAC, and so representative of the actual GMAT level and the graphics/looks too
; scored 770 and 760; very few (<5) Qs were from OG. I didn't re-install it, though I've heard people doing that, as I didn't have enough time; I gave them a couple of days before the exam and would recommend everybody to do so. For rest of the above tests, I didn't follow any particular order.
I didn't have the time and inclination to buy Princeton Review tests and neither do I know about them.
Will post more in some time; gotta go now, feeling sleepy
.
.
).
Linear Mode
