My Preperation Strategy

After reading many blogs and strategies of people who successfully conquered the GMAT. I noticed three salient features that were often the corner-stone of their preparation plans. Here is that list of features:

1. Do every problem in the Official GMAT books at least once. Do all the practice questions that come with the Powerprep Software. Do both the tests in Powerprep.
2. ManhattanGMAT’s Sentence Correction is one of the best resources for preparing for that. This book definitely helps. After having only read a short portion of the Book I’m better equipped to eliminate the wrong answers. I’m also doing this a lot quicker than I would have without the help of this book.
3. A good strategy is one that is tailor made for your situation. Every successful person’s de-brief or Blog I read had a different plan and used a variety of sources to achieve their goal.

Based on these points I’ve created a plan that I think will be successful for me. My preparation plan is split into two parts Quant preparation and Verbal preparation.

Quant Preparation:

1. Do all the problems in Official GMAT guide 11^th edition and Official GMAT Quantitative Review guide 11^th edition.
2. Do two or Three ManhattanGMAT’s Quant Challenge problems everyday while preparing for the Verbal section. This will help me to remain fresh with Quant problems to ensure that I don’t lose grip on that aspect of the exam.
3. Review Geometry, Probability and Combinatorics. These are my three weakest areas. Fortunately Probability and Combinatorics only compose of one or atmost two questions on any given test. So I’d want to focus most of my energy on Geometry in this section.

Verbal Preparation:

1. Read ManhattanGMAT’s Sentence Correction book. I’ve already read the first four chapters and done the exercises.
2. Read Kaplan’s GMAT 800 sections on the Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension. Warning: I don’t think these are the best resources. I find that I’m generally strong in both of these sections. I want a simple overview of the types of questions tested in GMAT under these sections and I find that this book does a good job at it.
3. Do all the problems in Official GMAT guide 11^th edition and Official GMAT Verbal Review guide 11^th edition.
4. Practise a few Analysis of Argument essays and Opinion Essay. I’m going to focus on writing a meaningfully structured, grammatically correct, and reasonably long essay. This is essentially what I did when I wrote the essays for GRE and managed to get a 5.5 so there was something correct in what I did.

Final Preparation (Last two weeks):

1. I will review a sample of questions from the Official guides for all the sections. I will focus more on the later questions in the OG just so that I remain at the top of the game.
2. Practice three of the paper tests I downloaded from MBA.com
3. Take the Powerprep and hope that I score over 700 :)