51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best! Highly Recommended, October 3, 2004
I used a total of five books in preparing for the GMAT: Barron's 13th edition, Petersons 2003 and 2004 CDs, Kaplan 2005, Nova's GMAT Prep Course 2003, and the Official Guide.
I have taken the GMAT twice. The first time I used the Barron's book and the Petersons CD and scored a 40% on math, 75% on verbal, and a 4.5 on the essay for a total score of 570. This score was unacceptable.
The second time around, I budgeted more time to study a day (around 6 hours) and for a longer time period (a month and a half). For me, I felt I had a strong background knowledge on all the required subjects, but I was not as honed on specific strategies and techniques for answering questions. My thoughts on each book:
Barron's: As a beginner, I enjoyed this book. I read the whole book and did all practice tests. They did not explain probability, sequences, and progressions questions well. In general, the math explanations were a bit sketchy. However, the word problem explanations were the best out of all the books.
Petersons: I just used the CDs and did not look at the book. After taking their adaptive practice tests, one is provided feedback which has questions divided into very difficult, difficult, etc. This is beneficial because you can see the level of difficulty at which you generally test. This is a really helpful addition that other CDs lack.
Kaplan: My least favorite book and CD. The book had very poor explanations for test questions. The book only offered general guidance for taking the test and outline common strategies. The cartoonish CD just became annoying and took more time than it was worth.
Nova: Far and away the best book. After reading reviews on various sites, everyone recommended Kaplan and Princeton Review, but no one mentioned this book. I found it by chance at the local book store. It covered everything on math and had exceptional, comprehensive explanations. Also, the drills after all chapters were very, very, very helpful. After doing all drills in Nova, the commonly considered difficult practice questions in Kaplan were almost a joke. I would recommend to anyone this book.
Official Guide: A must to have for everybody taking GMAT. I did the last third of the questions for each section, which are typically more difficult.
I recommend, in order from best to worst:
Nova, Official Guide, Petersons CDs, Barron's, Kaplan.
I recently took the test again and got a 96% in verbal, 60% in math, and a 690 overall.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent preparatory text, February 8, 2005
I am very happy with this book. After reading numerous reviews about this and other GMAT guides, I chose this one. It was not easy to find in bookstores, which largely carry the more familiar titles(Kaplan, etc.) I bought the book around Christmas.
I felt pretty rusty with much of the material(I've been out of school for a while), so I started working my way through the book a little at a time, somewhat haphazardly. Then I actually registered for the GMAT three weeks ago, and suddenly my sense of urgency got more intense.
Now then, the review:
I found that the coverage of the mathematics topics and the verbal topics to be thorough and comprehensive. I was able to re-familiarize myself with the material pretty quickly, and my performance on the test questions in the book improved a great deal. Similarly, I was able to improve my performance on the Verbal questions, although I found that section much harder to get into. This was more a function of the material than the writing.
To my mind, the greatest value this book offers is not the mathematics or grammatical reviews, but the test information that it offers. The factor that improved my scores on the Powerprep tests more than anything else was the dissection of the test, the explanations of the questions and how to answer them, and other test strategy information offered by this book.
If you just read the sections on the types of questions, what they are looking for, and how to attack them, you will improve your scores a lot. This is true of the essays as well. Once you memorize, or at least practice, the formulas for how to write the essays, you will get past the fact that the topics are stupid and pointless, and will be able to write a good essay despite the amazing banality of the topics.
The result: I got a 690 on the GMAT using only this book, and studying sporadically for a few weeks leading up to the test.
For reference, the first time I took Powerprep CAT 1(January), I got 34 Quant and 26 Verbal. On the Saturday before the test(February), I got 49 Quant and 36 Verbal. On the actual GMAT, I got 44 Quant and 41 Verbal. I give credit for the improvement to the test strategy and explanations provided in the book.
I highly recommend this book to help you prepare for the GMAT.
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