rat_rock

After a long, drawn-out process that's taken me about a year, I've finally finished for good. What a feeling! I can't wait to burn all my books. Or maybe I'll sell them. I started studying for the GMAT in February 2004. I work for a consulting firm that keeps me busy 12-18 hours a day, and trying to discipline myself to study when I got home at night just didn't work. I gave up after a couple months, and this past January, I decided to take the Manhattan GMAT course to force the discipline upon myself. Manhattan GMAT was an OK course. I picked up a few helpful ways of approaching problems over the course of the 8 weeks, but it was mostly a good forcing mechanism to practice specific types of questions for about 10 hours a week. I like to set up equations and to solve math problems that way, so I liked this course, which focused much more on learning real math than on strategies like plugging in. Nine out of 10 times, I can solve an equation faster than I can plug in five possible values. If this sounds like you, go for Manhattan rather than Princeton. After the course was over, I focused on doing lots of practice tests. I used Princeton Review, additional Cambridge tests, and a set of paper tests I bought and downloaded from ETS. I also went back and re-did all the problems I got wrong over the course of the three months I'd been studying. To help keep track of all the problems I did, I used Ursula's scoring grid to record my answers and results. You can download it here: http://www.wikigrammar.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=714. Or view Ursula's great post on her studying here: http://www.www.urch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10134. On test day, I loaded up on caffeine and headed down to the testing center above Penn Station in NYC. The test itself was fine. There were only a couple probability/combinatorics questions, but I know I got one of them wrong. There were a few questions overall that I'd seen in similar forms in the [tooltip=Official Guide]OG[/tooltip], but it didn't really help speed me up. Otherwise, not much else to report. Here are my practice test scores: A year ago, Feb/Mar '04: Kaplan: -Diagnostic: 650 -Test 1: 590 -Test 2: 600 Cambridge free test @ Manhattan GMAT center: 640-660 :::Took a long break to regroup::: Since January: Cambridge: 1 (week 0 of Manhattan GMAT course): 700-740 2 (week 5): 670-690 3 (week 8): 640-660 4 (post course): 670-690 Princeton Review: (Tests 1 and 2 got screwed up on my computer, so I only completed 3 & 4 online) 3: 710 (Q: 48, V: 40) 4: 720 (Q: 47, V: 43) ETS: -Paper Test Code 55: 750 (Q: 49, V: 46) -CAT 1: 770 (Q: 50, V: 45) -CAT 2: 760 (Q: 49, V: 45) Real GMAT: 770 (Q: 49, V: 48) I definitely pulled my verbal score up on the real GMAT. I owe it to not-as-tricky sentence corrections (or sentence corrections that I could see through pretty easily), fewer convulted critical reasoning questions, and passages that I could understand. I've been a lurker on here for a year, but I appreciate the resource the forum's been. Good luck everyone!