A brief review on the GMAT prep guides...

My sister wants to go for her MBA from an RA B&M school, and is preparing for the GMAT... Her test is scheduled for April, the 20th, and she has gone through almost all of the major prep books, such as ARCO, Kaplan, Princeton Review, Barron's and the Official GMAT guide. Since she had asked me to monitor her performance, I thought I'd share some of the insight we gained through these practice guides, and are giving a comparison...

We found the ARCO's Master the GMAT CAT to be the easiest, in that the questions (even at the "Very Difficult" level) were predictable and quite easy to solve. Barron's GMAT guide was a bit difficult as far as the Quantitative section is concerned, but the Verbal section was still not quite challenging. Princeton review's GMAT prep had almost the same level of difficulty as the Barron's guide, and the Verbal section had a few curve balls to get you thinking... All of the preceding did not match up to the difficulty level of the Official GMAT guide. Interestingly enough, we found Kaplan's to be the closest to the style and temprament of the Official guide. Before ordering the books, we read several reviews and saw that people often give negative reviews about Kaplan's prep as being too difficult, but I feel that it is the only way to score higher on the GMAT... If someone wishes to prepare for the GMAT and to score really high, he or she should go this way:

ARCO->Barron's->Pronceton->Kaplan->Official GMAT guide.

That is, if you are willing to go through all the guides, which may be feasible by borrowing them from the library if you don't want to spend a lot of money... needless to say, going this way costs less than spending a thousand odd bucks by registering in a GMAT prep course/seminar.

Any thoughts on that? Also, I would appreciate any tips for my sister for her GMAT exam if you think we've missed something...

Mahmood

 

I am using the Kaplan guide. It isn't bad but I am not satisfied with all of its functions. I took the baseline test and received only a 480. I studied every day for 3 hours and after 2 weeks, received a 440 on the second test. After resetting the entire program and retaking the baseline, I receive a 600.

Humm - odd. I am thinking of going to the second hand store and seeing if I can find the Arco version.

 

I took the GMAT about 4 years ago. I also bought a number of review books, and found Kaplan to be one of the better ones. Kaplan spends a lot of money trying to get their guides to be very close to the actual test. I'm not sure the other guides go that far.

My advice is to spend time taking practice adaptive tests on the computer. I spent way too much time with paper and pencil. The adaptive nature of the test is a little strange for us old timers who are used to being able to bounce around the test, and come back to questions later if the solution was not obvious at first.

The adaptive tests force one into tough decisions. If you get stumped, how much time do you spend on the problem before cutting your losses and moving on, since you must choose an answer in order to get the next question?

As you've probably read, it's important to get the first 5-8 problems correct on any section. Missing an early question makes a high score difficult.

Good luck.

 

Yes you are right about concentrating on the CATs rather than pencil and paper...

These days almost all prep guides come with CAT simulators with an average of 4-5 GMAT sample tests. Needless to say my sister has gone through about 16 test simulations by now and it does help a lot more than the old-fashioned pencil-paper combo.

Moreover, you can time yourself as well and concentrate on the problem solving rather than wasting time trying to fill out the answer sheet properly.