The Real Start and Study Materials

I stopped overworking myself for large consulting companies and started to work for my friend's start-up business, with a very flexible schedule, so that I can devote much of my time to getting into an MBA program. I was serious now, and with the current economic conditions, I believe that going back to school would be a wise step.

After I decided to take the GMAT for real, I spent quite some time deciding on the approach that I should take, while simultaneously doing timed questions from the official guides. I attended free workshops offered by different prep companies, trial classes, etc. Looked up books and reviews on amazon. Browsed the internet for ideas. In the end, I decided not to pay and take a class, because I had a fairly good grasp on the content as a whole, and half the time I would just be sitting in the class waiting for other people to understand.

Having said that, I did want more preparation materials than just the OG, and eventually decided on the set of Manhattan GMAT books (which are thin red booklets - not to be confused with "Manhattan Review", which are blue). I also downloaded the MGMAT syllabus and loosely followed it, so that I was alternating between different verbal and quant topics, not doing too much of anything at once and getting sick of it.

Study Materials

The only books I used were the MGMAT series (all 8 books) and the official guides. By the time I started the MGMAT series, I had already done over half of the official guide problems, in sequence. Here's a brief note on how helpful I found each book, keeping in mind that it only applied to my background:

Official guide: get all 3 books, and do each question at least once. Doing REAL questions are very helpful. Two years ago I never bothered to get the quant book. Then I figured that no matter how well I think I can grasp the concepts, it always helps to go through all official questions. And I was right.

Manhattan GMAT:
Sentence correction: yes, this is a must-have for anyone hoping to improve their sentence correction skills. I did the suggested exercises in the OG/VG after each chapter (including the ones that I had done before), and saw that most of my mistakes were about topics that I had not yet covered. It was also because of this that I decided to hold off doing the majority of my practice exams until after I was completely done with the reviews.

Critical reasoning: personally this was not much help to me. I'm fairly logical to start with, and I found that the best way to improve my CR was to do lots of practice and study each individual question that I did wrong, on a case-by-case basis. This way, I eventually learned to identify some of the things that were more subtle to me at the beginning. My revision of CR was more about doing the problem sets grouped by the type of reasoning (ie, strengthening, weakening, inference, etc) - this grouping may or may not have helped me, but I imagine that it would be more useful to someone who's weaker in CR.

Reading comprehension: since I sucked the most in sentence correction and reading comprehension, and I made an improvement in sentence correction, reading comprehension became my worst area. The guide wasn't completely helpful to me either - I would have no time to "actively" read by outlining the passage as I go along, and I didn't find this particularly useful either. But, I liked some of the points they have summarized at the end, one of them being making sure that you can account for EVERY word in your answer choice.

I knew every single concept in the quant books, but some of these books were still helpful:

Word translation: I really liked this because it gave some neat time-saving strategies that would be very useful for the more difficult problem, and it also had a good supply of extra practice problems. In general, their strategies can apply to all levels of questions, easy to difficult.

Number properties: again, I knew all the concepts, but it was very nice to see them systematically written out. I also was not familiar enough with this type of GMAT questions in general, so this provided just the extra review and exercises that I needed.

The other 3 quant books: not particularly useful to me - I've known all of these by heart since grade 3, no kidding. But they do look like good review material if you need help in any of these areas.