Customer Reviews

Barron's GMAT with CD-ROM (Barron's GMAT (W/CD))

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

My husband has been out of school for over 25 years, when he decided he wanted to take a Masters degree, so we needed a really good test prep product. The book is just fine at explaining concepts and ideas, and providing test strategies. But the CD is deeply disappointing. The questions are full of errors, many of them simply a matter of poor proofreading (in one, the greater-than sign is reversed into a less-than sign, making the entire question unsolvable). My husband was two questions away from the end of one of the practice tests on the CD when it froze up. Am I too picky in thinking a test-prep product should have ZERO errors, and software that works consistently? I don't think so!

The book was decent with many practice problems, but the explanations were sometimes too complicated and not structured enough for you to truly understand it. The CD is buggy, occasionally it stop and all the answer are lost, which is a major pain. Also, the answers are not saved, so you cannot go back to the ones you got wrong later on. I do have not used any other books, so i am not sure how it compares.

After using numerous other GMAT preparation tools from Kaplan, GMAC, and elsewhere, the quality of this product is below subpar. Numerous typographical and logical errors are present in the text, including:
-Questions on reading comprehension sections that were not printed (page 18)
-Duplicate answer choices for a question (page 71)
-An apparenty inability to number questions from 1 to 41 (page 45)

Given the lack of attention to detail along with a number of questionable justifications for answers, I would not recommend this book to anybody. Go with Kaplan, Kaplan800, or Princeton Review instead.

Where to start... First off, don't even put the CD in your computer! It's absolutely useless.
Take example 1: the questions for reading comp passages are not like in the GMAT, a series of 3-4 questions for an article at a time; instead, they randomly pop up articles during the test, which is particulary annoying, since you have to re-read the damn thing so many times.
Example 2: there is no scoring at the end of the test. They didn't even bother to try to guess the official scoring algorithm, they just tell you that if you get 0-10 questions wrong you did excellent or smth like that. That's no proper way of evaluating a CAT!
Example 3: most of the verbal question explanations are just plain stupid. "It's right because I say it's right", would be the best way to describe the author's attitude. You just need to take his word for it.
Example 4: Plenty of wrong problems! And I mean blatanly wrong, like a data sufficiency question coupled with problem solving answer options.

About the book: I have serious issues with books that cover tests but don't offer enough practice questions. This is probably the worst thing about this book: about 10-15 examples per verbal category, out of which only a handfull have decent explanations. The explanations/tips generally subpar and they really didn't make an effort to make the whole learning experience more pleasant!

IMHO: buy the OG for practice questions and Kaplan for some decent strategies (they also offer smth like 50 practice questions per verbal section, which I thought was very useful). Also I've only heard positive reviews about the Manhattan books.

This book has a good basic review of math, but it doesn't cover NEARLY all the things you need to know to take the GMAT. There are many questions in the book which are not addressed in the review section. The Verbal review is TERRIBLE. If you aren't an english major, I guarantee you will not understand what they're talking about. The best part of the book is the review questions, which any other book should be able to provide. The CD-ROM was VERY disappointing. If you're taking the test and want to stop, you can't save and come back to it, you have to take each test all the way through before you can see the answers. Long story short, pick another book.. you probably couldn't do much worse.

I found a couple errors in the questions.

One data sufficiency question asked about congruent triangles, giving you the area of the large triangle. Both the stems were each of the lengths of the same side of the triangle, one being larger than the other.

Oddly enough, you cannot find another side to the smaller triangle (or the large one, for that matter) because they did not state that it was a right triangle. Had they stated that, the question would have been right. Instead, it was wrong.

There were several questions like this. Sometimes a question would pop up more than once depending on how the software felt. I don't even trust it to tell me the right answer to the rest of the test I took.

What a waste.

This book is not the best, but too bad either. I ended up NOT using the CD because I didn't want to take the chance of having it screwing up my computer. Now, I am not saying that the CD is defective because I don't know. I am just saying that I was a bit paranoid :) I really should've just bought the edition without the CD. The writing style of the book is good. My beef is mostly with the math review section and some of the testing hints. It has about 90-95% of the GMAT math topics. A few topics are mentioned for the first time in the answer section for the sample tests at the back of the book. There are also some typos in the percentage/fraction conversion tables in the math review section. My biggest beef is that the author forgot to update the testing techniques because he said to "work on famalier topics first" for the verbal section. Hmmm, this advice would've worked on paper-based GMAT, but NOT on the CAT version. The strategy for data sufficiency and the logic behind reading comprehension and critical reasoning are extremely helpful though. Contrary to what some people said about the previous edition of the book, I don't think there is any wrong answer for the questions IN the book (again, I don't know anything about the questions on the CD). Finally, the grammar review section is good and bad at the same time. It is helpful to know the correct grammar for general purpose, but the topics covered in the book are sort of "off" as far as GMAT questions are concerned.

Excellent service and product. Highly recommend it. It arrived earlier than expected. So consider this as your sourcing option for test materials.

the software on the CD did not work as it should
1) It did not give me a score on an 800 scale at the end of the test
2) On some questions it did not allow me to change my answer even though I hadn't yet confirmed my response (i.e I hadn't yet moved on to the next question, I had merely clicked on a response)
3) Worst of all were the reading comprehension questions. In the actual GMAT the tester is presented in with a passage and all questions related to the passage are listed together. Not so on the Barron's CD - the software presents questions related to reading comprehension in random order across the test. So you could get reading comprehension passage # 1, followed by one question related to passage #1; then some sentence correction questions then a reading comprehension passage #2, followed by 1 question related to passage #2; then another question related to passage # 1.
4) there were numerous typos

took 2 weeks for book to arrive and when it got here it was damaged due to horrible packaging. the CD was shattered into a 100 pieces and when i returned the book i requested a full refund but i didn't and was still charged for shopping!!!!!!!!!!!!!