Customer Reviews

GMAT Prep Course : 2000

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

Basically if you would like to have good book which teaches you fundamental principles then it is a very good book. I did not like the SOFTWARE. But Math section is very good and very clear. If you are looking for some short cut then this is not the real book. But you would like to work hard and prepare for the high and medium difficulty questions then this is good book. But DONT buy this book for the software. For the software GMAT POWERPREP will be the best in my opinion.

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.

I am a Professor of English, and I make double my salary tutoring on the side. I make it my business to find books and use them to help students get into graduate school. I have found the Nova book complete in every aspect. I don't have time to write this, so the fact that I did should convey my satisfaction. Furthermore, the student should have a complete understanding of the math and sentence correction portions upon completion of the course. Without unnecessary rhetoric, the text is exact, with comprehensive yet concise answers, in the math and verbal sections.This is definitely a three year crash course in a several month program. Lastly, again, as a Professor, the answers were correct, concise, and cutting to the point.To suggest otherwise, especially in the English portion, indicates the reader has a need of rudimentary teaching.

I've found this book to be quite helpful despite poor editing. There are several errors with problems in the math section which can be quite misleading, especially if you don't already have a good handle on the material. If you already have a good handle on the material, what the hell do you need this book for anyway? Judging by how many I found, I'm frightened to think how many I missed and I'm just talking about the math.....

I never write book reviews at Amazon, but feel compelled to caution you on this one.

I've been studying for about 3 months now and have become quite familiar with the GMAT. I've studied 3 books (Kaplan, Official and Princeton) and have taken about 10 practice tests so far. My practice test scores are between 650 and 710 with math my strong point. Next, I'm going to study the Official GMAT Math, the Official GMAT Verbal and Kaplan 800 and take the GMAT in 3 weeks. If I don't get over 700, I'll take the Veritas Weekend Course and try again.

I bought this book because of the great reviews I read here at Amazon. I was very impressed with Part One: MATH - Standard Math and was really excited that I had found a good book, but then the disappointment came.

The author of the book does not understand how to construct the Data Sufficiency questions properly. I first noticed this problem in his example questions explaining how these questions work on page 293, examples 4 and 7 --they both display his misunderstanding.

I was surprised at first, but when I started to do his exercise problems, I realized that the author really didn't understand. At least 2 of 7 explanations and 9 of 75 questions have the same problem I'm talking about. (A few other questions and answers have a variety of different problems and/or mistakes, too.)

If you would like to see what the problem is, go to the top of this page, click the image of the book cover to 'Search Inside', search for 'page 293' and look at Example 4. The correct answer is x = 64, x is even, NOT odd as he states in statement (1).

On real GMAT data sufficiency questions, both statements (1) and (2) do NOT contradict each other as his statements often do. This may seem trivial to you if you don't understand these questions well, but if you do, you know what I'm talking about. It's important because looking at statement (1) gives you a clue or clues to whether or not statement (2) is sufficient or not. If the statements disagree as some of his questions and answers do, you will be thrown off and confused. The real GMAT question statements and corresponding answers never disagree with each other as his do. You can confirm this by studying Data Sufficiency in the Official GMAT Guides.

I hope this helps and good luck to all :-)

Tough but outstanding!
This is an excellent book. I think it will put you over the top in the math section of the GMAT (the only part I studied). Many of the book's questions are brutal and, in fact, the author says that 10% of the book's questions are more difficult than any you will find on the GMAT. This will greatly increase your skills as well as confidence. I would recommend however that you also purchase Kaplan's GRE/GMAT workbook (another excellent book) to supplement Nova's. I would start with Kaplan which seems to assume less math knowledge in the reader and then move on to Nova. Nova has 22 math sections and unlike any other GMAT book that I've seen, it has an entire section on Defined Functions. I think this book will impart confidence in the test taker also. Working these problems will have you telling ETS to 'Bring it on!' This book is well worth the money!

This book's mathematics review, depsite some obvious errors, is useful and provides a somewhat more challenging and more representative set of algebra word problems than does Princeton Review's off-the-shelf book. The sentence correction review, however, is poor: some of its answers are simply wrong (I speak as a former writing tutor) or are simply unrepresentative of the questions of the real GMAT. Princeton Review and Kaplan both provide far superior preparation for sentence correction questions.

I think this book contributed about 10% to my overall score. The most helpful books were Princeton Review and the OG and its supplements. The problem with this book is that it cannot be used as your main source of strategy because, well it introduces non-traditional methods as well as questions that are not very similar to the actual GMAT questions.

Don't get me wrong, the exercises are very good, but I only used a portion of the book because I discovered this book late in my preparation.

This book really has no strategy in the data sufficiency portion, which is far and away the more difficult portion of quant for everyone.

Sentence correction is not that great either.

Where this book shines is the math review (which is quite thorough), the introductory logic (great if you never took any logic courses), and the reading comprehension (which a lot of quant-heads fear).

The most helpful part was the reading comp. This book is the first I've read and the only one that I know of that tells you that you need to understand the reading passage. There are two types of reading comp questions -- general/specific which any person of minimal intelligence can get right by sifting through the passage and inference questions which test your ability to understand the passage. If you cannot answer both of these questions, you will not score very highly in verbal. Inference questions separate the boys from the men. This book has some good reading exercises. The exercises are not geared specifically for the GMAT, but it does help you to improve your reading skills.

I am very happy to say that at the GMAT exam, which I studied with this book, I received 710 points. Especially the Verbal Part of this book is very useful, and each headline is stated clearly with many examples. Although its software is not very good, I can strongly recommend the book itself, if you decide to work hard. You'll see it'll work.