My GMAT preparation

Out of 1000 people who take GMAT, 20 score 750 or above. Out of these 20, atleast 5 are bloggers. Out of these 5 atleast 2 feel happy about this and want to share their experience with the world. So this is no rocket science that there are umpteenth blogs out there giving excellent advise on how to go about preparing for the GMAT. First of all you must understand that different people have different study habits and different degree of grasping powers. Kindly DO NOT alter your study habits or try replicating someone else's schedule just because the latter could do good on the G-Day. I have reasons to believe that anyone can score 740+ in GMAT without doing anything creative.

Having said that, I am sharing my study plan.

Modus Operandi
I have a very demanding job and an extremely pesky boss so I understood that I can not manage more than 3-4 hours a day. My office timings are 11am-8pm but I seldom reach home before 10. I set aside 11pm-1am and 9am-10:30am everyday for GMAT preparation. I would ideally give 6-7 hours on weekends and took a test almost every weekend after 3 weeks of preparation. I stuck to this schedule like a leach. In retrospect, I am amazed at my discipline. I had never been so sincere all my life .

Verbal
My first diagnostic test revealed that I need special attention on SC and CR. For SC I started with Manhattan SC Guide (Its indispensable) and finished it in a week. I followed it up with OG11 SC and finished it too. Please note that It's very important to keep referring Manhattan SC guide from time to time. I think this much practice brought my SC level to 70% accuracy and I was ready for the SC1000 document. The best way to gain from SC1000 is to revisit the questions you got wrong or got correct by fluke. Copy the first 5 words of the question and search it on google. Almost all possible questions have been discussed on either testmagic.com or manhattangmat.com forums. These 2 websites contain a wealth of information and you should exploit them.
For CR I started with the OG11 and backed it up by CR1000 series. I tried some LSAT tests too but I do not recommend them.
So by 3 weeks using "brute force" I more or less overpowered my fears and began to enjoy CR and SC.

In a nutshell The books I relied on were : OG11, Manhattan SC, 1000 series (Helped me a lot) and Spidey's grammar notes. I referred Kaplan800 too but did not finish it. Also try to get your hands on gmat sets 21-30. They have excellent questions.

Quant
Being an engineer my quant skills are pretty decent. However, my DS was a tad problematic and my speed a bit slow. Realizing that this may spell doom I also practiced quant enough. Kindly try to download the document from Beat The GMAT Forum. They have good material and give a good practice. Also the quant questions in Manhattangmat tests are a great practice but please understand that those questions are way above the GMAT standard and prepare you for the worst.
I prepared for quant mostly from mock GMATs. I took some 16 tests in the span of 3 months and I think they gave a good exposure.

So, as you can see my preparation method was far from being methodical. It was more of understanding my weaknesses and clobbering them using brute force (read..practice). It worked for me but that in no way guarantees similar result for another subject.
My advise would be to cut out a strategy at the very outset and stick to it militantly. In the end performance in GMAT is directly proportional to your labor and your mental toughness.

Best of luck to all.

Rajnikanth opposite Angelina

Watched "Wanted" today. It was an action flick with no compelling storyline. However, the action scenes and the stunts were breath taking and at times preposterous.
I watched this movie with one of my friends who does not miss a single opportunity to make fun of Rajnikant's larger than life stunts. He deems watching movies with such scenes an assault on intellectuality. But for some reason he kept bragging about how he loved this movie and how incredible the action scenes were....hahaha.....

Warning.....Following content may contain spoilers
Picture this.....Angelina Jolie fires a bullet and for some reason, bullet follows a circular path and hits her after killing 5 men in it's wake. I guess Rajni was less skilled when he shot a gangster, who was standing on the other side of a wall, by deflecting a bullet using a coin. He had to waist a coin while Angelina could have simply dodged the wall by her circular firing. Beat it...both are equally ludicrous and defy common logic and laws of physics alike. So if a Hollywood fart is an "Aha" for you but at the same time a Mithun somersault puts you off, it just shows your inferiority complex and double standards.
Lol...I guess I am getting unreasonably philosophical now. At least you can watch Angelina Jolie coming out of the shower for a change ;)

GMAT Tamed

Took my GMAT on Thursday, 3rd of July. Got a 750 (Q50, V40, AWA 5).

There are scores of de-briefs by guys scoring well in their GMATs all over the internet. Some of them are really helpful. I do not deem myself worthy to give right recommendations on GMAT preparation as my approach to GMAT was not very methodical. I relied more on brute force (Read...practice) over systematic preparation. I may right a debrief some day but I suggest people not to follow my study plan ;).

It was a very important day for me as I have been preparing for this day for the past 3 months (well....2 months seriously). I had to put a lot of things at bay and stick to my study schedule like a leach to manage this score.
Let me run you through the events of the day.

I slept at half hour past midnight on 2nd July like I used to do everyday. My friends and well wishers kept telling me to sleep early as I had booked the morning slot for myself. However, I was not very keen on disturbing my usual routine. I kept telling myself that tomorrow is just another day and that an exam can not be more important than me.
I woke up at 7 and started off at 7:45. Bought 4 bananas and a barboun chocolate as breakfast. The autodriver who would drop me to the center was not in the best of his moods and kept trying to piss me off but I was determined to mainatain a calm and cool disposition and kept laughing his impertinence off (This probably pissed him off more ;)). I reached the center well before 8:30. The center was closed then, so I decided to read some of the sample essays as I had barely prepared for AWA (Not recommended). The center opened at precisely 8:30 and we were let in by the lady in charge. She took our finger prints and verified our documents and reminded us of exam rules. I requested them to allow me to wear anti glare glasses as I had taken all my mock GMATs wearing the same and I did not want to do anything different today. However, the test administrators did not budge and said that only powered specs are allowed. Considering this as a bad sign I entered the exam room. It was a sound proof, video monitored room which looked like a posh cyber cafe.

AWA
I immediately pounced on the awa topics and started typing frentically at the moment I saw the topic. This forced my fellow, GMAT taker to make a grumpy face. Showing some consideration for my grumpy colleague, I started typing softly and finished both, arguement and issue sections with 5 minutes to spare. AWA, I must admit, is a great ice breaker. It got me in the roll and I felt ready for the real test.

QUANT
I utilized the 10 minute break fully and ate a dairy milk chocolate in the break. The first quant question was joke of a question but I still gave it a good 2 minutes rechecking it several times. In fact first 15-20 questions were very easy and I began to think that I must be doing something wrong as the difficulty level is not rising. Anyways, I made a promise to myself that I will not panick and consider this exam as just another mock exam. The difficulty level slowly began to escalate and the 27th question took me some 6 minutes :(. I admit that It was very bad time management on my part and I should have proceeded much earlier. I was left with some 6 questions in last 8 minutes and to my dismay I began to panick. I am sure I must have got a couple of questions wrong in this part due to my earnestness. I finished the paper with 30 seconds to spare and left the room for the 10 minutes break with a heavy heart.

VERBAL
Devoured another Dairy Milk Bar and took a leak. Blew water on my face and thumped my fists on the rest room wall. I tried to convince myself that no matter what I can not get less than 50 and proceeded towards the exam room with a renewed hunger to tame the beast.
The bad time management in Quant section reminded me the importance of keep pushing myself and I sweared that I will not get stuck at any question for an obscene amount of time.
1st Questions CR - Very easy. Could eliminate 4 answer choices easily...Hmmm good going dude, Bring em on. Questions were of standard difficulty and I got my first RC as the 11th question. RCs were also of standard difficulty and were not inconscionably difficult like Kaplan's RC. I must say that I was happy with me as I progressed in the verbal section. I had 15 minutes remaining when I reached the 39th question and gave some 5 minutes to it just for a change ;).
41st question was a sentence correction question which I was confident of. Finished the section with 7 minutes to go. Great...All's well that ends well :).

"Do you want to cancel your scores or proceed for score calculation"...Hmmm....PROCEED.
Then came the stupid personal details form which I am sure no one wants to fill. Kept klicking next until I reached the final screen. PROCESSING......dhak dhak....dhak dhak.

Looked here and there. looked at my grumpy neighbour and smiled. He made a bad face again and turned to his monitor......"Why is it taking so much time...Am I screwed already"....The wait was unbearable.
And then it came
Quant - 50 (94 percentile)
Verbal - 40 (89 percentile)
Total - 750 (98 percentile)

I punched my fists in the air and almost yelled. The administrator came running inside and threatened me of cancelling my scores....Lol...I was too ecstatic to listen to her and got out of the room saying sorry. Before leaving I turned to my sad ass neighbour. perhaps he was filling the details form then. I guess he got the message and smiled back.
It was a great feeling. Though I got a couple of 780s and 770s in my mock GMATs and could have surely done better, I was extremely content with my score.
The beast had been tamed :)