I will take the GMAT at the beginning of this coming Janurary, so I have about five months to prepare for it. My goal is to get above 700 on the real test. I need some advices from those of you who took it and scored more than 700. Which book should I buy, and how much time should I allocate myself to study. Thanks!
I'm currently taking Princeton Review for the GMAT. My goal is ALSO to break 700 (I'm getting close, but math kills me). I'm taking the test in late September. I'd definitely consider taking some sort of class for review. I'm learning quite a bit about how to approach the test, what questions are likely to show up, how to properly attack the data sufficiency math questions, etc. You know, stuff I couldn't learn from a book. For instance, did you know that the first 10 questions of each section do more to determine your score than the other 27-31 questions? Did you know that roughly 25% of the questions in each section are experimental? Also... practice, practice, practice! Learn your grammar rules (noun-verb agreements, pronoun ambiguity, verb tenses, etc.). Brush up on algebra. Practice taking tests with scratch paper (rather than writing on the tests). Familiarize yourself with the essay portion (although it really doesn't affect your score).
Princeton Review's "Cracking the GMAT" is great. I only prepped about three weeks for it and found that it really helped. VS, I don't have much to offer in terms of how much that book helped with math, but it really helped me on the verbal portion. From some friends of mine that struggled more with the quantitative portion they thought that Princeton Review's texts helped them just as much. Good luck. oooh... also, when you buy the Princeton Review books I believe you get four practice tests which can be taken online. Definitely take all the practice tests you can!
I think there is some kind of software that you can download. GMAT Powerprep or something like that. At least it was possible to download it a few years ago, when I took it. It has a few practice questions or something...I don't remember very well, because I really only did a few practice questions from that thing, no book or course. But I guess that thing could give you a first indication of where you approximately are, without practice.
Can someone who has the previlege please help me to do a search for the past threads that have this topic? With the size of this forum, I am pretty sure it's been discussed before. Thanks!
