Customer Reviews

How to Prepare for the GMAT with CD-ROM (Barron's GMAT (W/CD))

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

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.

Boy, did I learn the hard way!

I bought this book at a bookstore before checking the reviews on this (and all GMAT Prep books) and boy, am I sorry.

$29.99 and countless hours of frustration, aggravation and tears, and then I logged in and read the other reviews. I wasn't stupid or crazy!

The tests were ridiculous. The answers were worse. I sent a sample question to three of the smartest people I know, and I mean Engineer-MBA-can't-beat'em-at-trivial-pursuit-and-know-everything-about-history-politics-religion-everything smart... and they scored as poorly as I did. Out of 6 questions on one reading comprehension sample, no one got more than 3 of them correct.

Then, when I turned to the answer key, the answer made no sense at all. I found myself turning pages and saying out loud: Is this the same question?? Am I on the wrong page? IT DOESN'T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THIS IN THIS READING!!! etc.

Whoever was responsible for editing this book must have been on vacation that day.

This book almost caused me to toss the idea of going back to school altogether. I graduated college 4 years ago, and after a few hours with this book was sure that I lost all brain cells in those 4 years.

This is the hands-down worst book you'll ever buy -- save yourself the time and money. Check out ALL reviews that Amazon offers -- so far, it looks like the Official Guide for the GMAT review looks best. Excellent reviews and lots of 'em.

Don't buy Barrons ANYTHING. Don't be fooled like me into believing they're a reputable name, so surely their book will be helpful. This book made me want to chuck myself over a bridge.

Reading reviews and purchasing based on that may be the SMARTEST THING YOU CAN DO.

oh and PS - DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!! (did I mention that??)

Barrons has any sections with incorrect printing and missing words. Questions are of not good standard and pattern as asked in the exam. The CD-ROM has full length test but does not provide good explanation for the answers. I scorred 730/800 and I attribute it to Kaplan, Princeton and Official Guide to GMAT.

Barrons is good for GRE but not for GMAT

This book is truly unusual and therefore a terrible place to start studying. The quantitative review pays no heed to the fact that you are sitting for a timed test and therefore must work efficiently, using shortcuts when possible. This book tells you the long way to get to the answer. For that, it is a decent way to go if you want to really re-learn the math that underlies the problems (for example, I found the Princeton Review book to have too many "tricks" and not enough real math review). I did learn a few things from it, but eventually abandoned it for Kapan and GMAC guides. Not a complete waste of time, but certainly not where I'd recommend beginning or ending your GMAT study adventure.

This is the biggest waste of money I ever committed. The math review is not comprehensive enough. I'm looking at other review books and there are many concepts not covered in Barron's. The section where it reviews grammar does not explain the rules in detail and assumes one has a knowledge of basic grammar. I think if we didn't need brush-ups on the basics then we wouldn't be looking to buy these review books. I would definitely advise against buying this book.

The book may be a little outdated. However, I liked the Essay Writing Review and think that the Math questions are pretty good. As for the critical reasoning, I found that the questions were different from those on the actual GMAT and I sometimes didn't quite agree with the reasoning. The other verbal sections are fine. I bought this book first, then Kaplan and the Official ETS Guide. Barron's was good to develop my skills. Yet, I wouldn't recommend studying this book right before the test. For that, the questions are just not similar enough to the real ones.

I purchased a number of GMAT books, including the ETS official guide. While the ETS guide includes actual questions that have appeared on the exam, it does not have any test reviews or diagnostic tools.
Even though I found that some of the Critical Reasoning questions in the Barron's book were more difficult than on the actual exam, the preparation helped my readiness and comprehension. The reviews were especially helpful.
Using the CD-ROM to get ready for the exam saved me a lot of time in the test room.
I highly recommend this book.

I wasted two weeks with this book before I realized that it was full of errors. Every answer key has at least a few mistakes in it, and sometimes the answer explanations would say C) but then go on to describe why B) was the correct answer.

This book also does not mention the fact that it is a computer based test and that getting correct answers results in harder questions coming up - and that getting the early questions correct is the only way to get a higher score.

This book ALSO gives 5 practice tests that are organized into 7 sections - THIS IS NOT THE FORMAT OF THE GMAT EXAM. And I checked with a friend who confirmed that when he took the GMAT in 1999 it was in the same format it is now.

I'm not upset that I wasted $20 on this book, but I'm very upset that I wasted my time. This book very well could have hurt my score and my chances to get into a certain MBA program.

As stated in the previous reviews, this book is loaded with errors. The CD-ROM isn't exempt from these either. I found 2 significant errors in their online exams within the first hour of using them; one a math problem, the other a sentence correction problem. No subject is safe! So far, I've found 6 errors between the book and the CD, and I bought it less then 24 hours ago. Stay away from this set!

I bought the Barron's GMAT book because I succesfully used their SAT book when I was in high school. I am about 170 pages into it and have found and documented 6 instances where the book is flat out wrong. For example, pg 163 in a table giving decimal equivalents of fractions the book says 1/100 = 0.1. Wrong!!! The errors have caused me great frustration and if my test wasn't 2 weeks away, I would burn this book and get another one. Don't they edit these things? I can't speak for any of the other manuals but I would advise steering clear of the Barron's book. If authors Jaffe (MBA, PhD) or Hilbert (Phd), or anyone from Barron's would like my error list, I'd be glad to provide it...for a refund of course.