Excellence

It's hard to overstate how well MGMAT does its job. Want to score well on the GMAT? Willing to work hard but looking for the most efficient path to content acquisition? MGMAT is your path. It's not cheap, but what you are paying for is not only top-level 99th percentile instructors (by far the highest paid in the industry) and original curriculum materials drafted and constantly revised by the instructors themselves.

I took the 9-week course, though if you wanted to do it in less time or felt that you could just teach yourself the material I suppose you could just buy the books and online access to the tests. But I do have to say that at least in my class, my teacher (Jen Dziura) gave us specific strategies for some questions that I wouldn't have paid attention to in the curriculum. These strategies for questions in math on rates or in verbal on CR were often ultimately the ones I studied and used in the final test.

I also appreciated the pacing and layout of the content over the 9 weeks. I did the homework every week (which was especially time-consuming at the beginning, as I really needed some work in re-learning my high school math), but just trusted in the schedule and kept going. I made some flashcards and spent some extra time on things that didn't come back as easily, but after the class ended I was impressed by how much of that content stuck as I started doing timed OG problems.

At that point, all I needed to do was tie up loose ends (like memorizing the right triangle rules) and speed it up to get each problem under 2 minutes. I spent 1 month doing OG problems and then took the test, to see a huge improvement on my original score. (From 630 to 770 -- Q50 V46)

The forums are helpful, as are the other online components of the class -- I made use of the "Thursdays with Ron" live online sessions, as well as their online companion to the Official Guide, which allows you to track progress on your OG problems -- giving you not only immediate explanations to questions after you've done them, but also tracking your timing and track record on questions sorted by theme, format, etc.

Also, the practice tests are the best in the business, and in my experience very representative of the actual test. And their systems provide tons of feedback based on your answers to questions to guide your subsequent studying.

MGMAT's method is building content expertise -- no silver bullet, no reliance on "tricks" or "talent." It's a harder path, but the good news is that anyone can learn content, and their materials lay out the best path to do so.