Great verbal, good quant, ok IR

Overall, the 9 week course with Manhattan Prep was great. The in person classes are a great way to stay focused and force yourself to stay on some sort of schedule. The teacher was really knowledgeable and super helpful.

The verbal section is great. I really liked that the teacher stressed that native English speakers shouldn't just rely on a gut feeling if SC questions sound right. He definitely stressed how to break down a question and find what's wrong. The CAT questions were a pretty good approximation of what was on the actual GMAT. The math section was good, but seemed to have more probability questions than I saw on the test. I really liked how the course taught you how to approach quant questions, including guessing and their "smart numbers" technique to get to the answer without setting up a lot of algebra.

The IR was much harder than what's on the real test. The instructor was clear about that in class so I felt a little better when I took the practice exams and kept getting low scores on IR. I didn't need to do super well on IR but I didn't want a super low score either.

The practice tests seemed harder overall than what I got on the real test and the official GMAT practice tests. I scored higher on the real thing in the end though so maybe it's better to have the practice tests be a little harder (though it does kind of hurt your morale). I really liked the explanations for practice test questions and all the score reports at the end. They were really helpful for pointing me to what I was doing wrong and where I should direct my studying.

There's a LOT of homework and it's worth it to really invest in it. I fell behind after week 3 and I felt it on the practice tests. I had to put my life on hold for 2-3 weeks and study because I hadn't been great about keeping up with the homework. If you can't do all of it, it's better to get the gist from the fundamentals book and then over index on the strategy guides.

Overall, I definitely recommend checking out the free Class 1 at the very least. The course is pretty pricey but it seemed worthwhile to invest. There are some discount codes out there so do some googling.