Customer Reviews

Kaplan GMAT 800, 2005-2006

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am finally over with the GMAT... what a nice feeling :)
I decided to try and save some money and study on my own using all the books I could find. I used:

* Kaplan 800 (2005-2006)
* Kaplan 2005
* Princeton 2003
* The Official Guide
* Barron 2000
* Kaplan and Princeton CD-ROMs.

I found the GMAT 800 very useful, especially in the verbal section. While doing the drills I was getting about half of them wrong, which allowed me to improve by learning from my mistakes. The Reading Comprehension passages are simply the ugliest one can imagine - Very good preparation for the exam.
The critical reasoning questions also had some nice edges to them and confusing answers to choose from (Reading the explanations removed the confusion and helped me understand the reasoning behind the answers)
Oh, and the Sentence Correction... These were a joy! Some very tough ones in that section and they touch all the types of questions that can be found in the exam.

The math section was o.k. It has the toughest math questions from all the books, but still not close enough to the real exam, and here I really felt there were too few question.

If had to choose two books to study with, I would choose this book and the official guide (and the CD-ROMs)

Overall this is an excellent book, either as a first book to introduce the different types of questions, or as a review of hard questions a week before the exam.

Kaplan's GMAT 800 offers the most challenging sample problems for students who want a top score.

I raised my score 60 points from 650 on my first Powerprep run to 710 on the actual test with only three weeks of prep. Using both Kaplan and Princeton Review books offers the perfect well-rounded preparation. Princeton Review offers advice on how to read the questions and eliminate answers. ButKaplan has the advantage in sample problems (challenging and, for the most part, well-explained).

In my mind, Princeton Review seems to have less respect for the test. They want you to beat it by understanding its design amd seeing through its tricks. Kaplan, on the other hand, wants to help you do well through thorough review of the material. Both are important appraoches, and they complement each other well.

The Kaplan GMAT 800 book is a great study guide in tandem with the 11th Edition (or 10th) Official GMAT Guide. DO NOT RELY SOLELY on this book. The GMAT 800 book does indeed do what it promises to - offer more difficult level questions. However, don't be mistaken into thinking that practicing and getting all hard level questions right automatically means getting a 700+ on the real GMAT. The GMAT format is ADAPTIVE, which means that you start out with medium (and easy) level questions which progress if you continue to improve.

Although working on GMAT 800 questions trains your brain to work through more challenging questions on the real GMAT, students might start to miss the short cuts that are available to many answers near the beginning of the real GMAT. Additionally, students who have an issue with consistency will face great problems if they only work with hard questions. Hard questions force you to double-check, easy questions is a killer for many test-takers because they forget to double-check the most simplest of questions (which causes them to get questions wrong in the beginning of the test - subsequently, they won't even get to the more difficult questions no matter how much they prepared for them).


This book should be for students who consistently get 80-90% above accuracy in the Official Guide. The Official Guide is definitely easier than the real test for 600+ scorers. So if you practice the Official book for accuracy and timing, and the GMAT 800 book for challenge sets, you will be in a good position to do well on the test. Additionally, if you are self-preparing (which I assume many of the readers here are), you want to get one of the more "normal" level guides from either Kaplan or Princeton Review to lay the foundation for the basic strategy.

Full Disclaimer:
I oversee a test preparation center located in Hong Kong (Capstone Prep), and part of our job is to make sure our courses are updated and presented to the best and most stringet of standards. To that effect, I filter through nearly all test prep books in the market (for the SAT, GMAT, LSAT, GRE and TOEFL). We have on affiliations with Kaplan or Princeton Review, in fact, they are our competitors here. However, their guides are great resources for those that wish to go at the exams alone.

I have been been really busy with work and neither did I have too much time to study for GMATs, nor an extra grand to spend on a prep course. I needed above a 700 and I know from SAT practice that the prep courses are geared for students aiming for the mid 600s as the goal.

At least for me, I used the Princeton Review Cracking the GMAT (2006 edition) as a starter to familiarize myself with the test.

I think the 10th edition official guide by GMAC is a a great transition. Honestly, though, the CD was much more useful since it familiarized me with the actual computer format of the exam (although the CAT part of it is questionable - and be careful about doing too many practice questions from the book or the CD sice you might see some recylce on your 2 practice exams).

However, the best preparation is the GMAT 800 from Kaplan - it's not too great on the strategies, but if you learn by example like me, it's perfect since the examples are challenging and written for somebody aiming for above 93 percentile. I can't speak too much on the quant section, but the verbal section is awesome.

It has a great section on sentence correction which I found to be incredibly useful in improving my score. I really feel that by going through all the verbal questions, I learned the fundamental grammer that GMAT requires for a good score.

I was scoring on the practice in the mid 600s, and taking two days off work to completely go through the verbal section of this book was the key to getting me a 750 on the exam

Good luck with your exam and MBA application

I agree that the questions in this book are harder than average. It's quite useful understanding all of the questions and solutions in this book if you need a good score (700+). If you aim for 600 then Princeton review or something equivalent might be sufficient for you.

I took the test 5 years ago and got 600 (75th) so I knew what I was up against and had done all the OG 10th edition questions before. This time around my goal was 90th+ percentile (690), but I had very little time to practise, about a month and max 10 hours pr week, as I was busy studying Mandarin at an intensive program in Beijing. My strategy for achieving the score I needed:

- Study with the hardest questions.
- Understand why you fail. Do the questions that you got wrong again in the following week to make sure you know why you did them wrong and how to do them right.
- Try to find more than one methodology to solve each question. After each practise-test, go through all the exercises again, this time with no time-limit. The purpose is to find better methods of solving the q's you got right, to understand why you got some wrong and how best to solve these questions. You especially need to focus on remembering the correct/smartest methodology (perhaps do a couple of questions of each type), but I'd say it's best having a repertoaire of 3 or more methods for each type of question.
- Multiple choice is a game of odds, so you need to perfect your techniques for guessing in case you get questions you cannot solve easily and quickly, or if get stuck. 1) Use POE/process of elimination (I did it on a piece of paper during the test - very useful), especially on CR and SC. 2) Plug in on PS questions where it can save you time. These two methods definitly helped me increase my score.
- Practicalities: Check out the center before test-day to reduce stress come test-day. On the test day: take the breaks and try to clear your mind before commencing the next part.

My practise test results (after I had done all the exercises in the Kaplan 800):

- Princeton 1: 670 Q43 V40 (a year and a half before the test)
- Kaplan Diagnostic: 650 (2 weeks before the test)
- Kaplan 1: 550 Q33 V31 (1 week before the test)
- Kaplan 2: 570 Q31 V36 (1 week before the test)
- Powerprep 1: 680 Q46 V38 (1 week before the test)
- Kaplan 3: 560 Q32 V35 (5 days before the test)
- Kaplan 4: 550 Q32 V33 (3 days before the test)
- Princeton 2: 640 Q34 V44 (3 days before the test)

Notice that my scores were not improving. I got 710 on the test, perhaps I was lucky given that my practise test results were not on that level. But I still think it should be possible getting 750 with more practise. Overall I'd say I couldn't have gotten the score I got without using the Kaplan 800 or a similar tool, not sure whether other alternatives exist on this level of difficulty though.

Here is my take on this book -
This book will benefit you if you are looking for the following(s) -
1. To get a good idea of what types of questions are generally asked in each section of GMAT. By "types" I don't mean level of toughness of the questions, but the variety of question types that are asked. If knowing this helps you build a strategy or know what your strengths/weaknesses are and set goals accordingly, then this book should interest you.
2. Read this book earlier on. What I mean is this book discusses strategies on how to handle different question types, so if you are mid-way into you preparation, chances are that you already have a strategy (good or bad) for different questions and are not likely to change everything just because you have got a new book. Also, it is my opinion that changing strategy mid way can be painful even if marginally beneficial.
3. No CD is a big let down. I expected some tests at the end but no so.
4. The cover claims there are hundreds of questions... may be only 150-200 max. I won't call it "hundreds of questions..." !
5. Verbal seems stronger that Quants, though this may be my opinion because I feel much more in control of my Quants than verbal and so see more scope for improvement in verbal.
6. Should spend time practicing the strategies you learn her when you work on other books, else the material in this book can be forgotten very fast.

Would not be much beneficial if you are -
1. Looking for more questions to solve. there are no tests and no CD.
2. a couple of weeks away from the test. It will only end up scaring you by its high octane questions! Also, the author's love for talking can be a turn-off when you don't have too much time for chatting! :)
3. If you are still going though basic grammar and math skills that are needed for GMAT. This book does not cover the basic study material and makes that clear to the reader.


Disclaimer:
I am still going through the book though I have spent a few hours skimming through it. I was skeptical earlier on but as I read some sections I did see that the material was useful. But since I am in the middle of my preparations, I am not sure how much it will benefit me. My feelings about the book are mixed.

I still give it 4 stars because it is good in what it does though what it does may not match your expectations or needs! depending on where you are in you preparation. :)


that's all folks!
good luck

My disclaimer, and I think it's a useful one: I used this book. I took the test. My (unofficial--haven't gotten the official report yet) score was 740, which was somewhere in the realm of 98th percentile, and about where I was wanting to end up. I don't think that the book is responsible for all of this, but I'm definitely in the realm of test-takers it's targeting. If you're *not* aiming for 700+, I'm pretty sure there are more useful books out there.

For my own purposes, however, I would say this book was good. I would suggest getting it, a general book, and the PowerPrep software from the GMAT people and using all of them. Do as many questions as you have time for. The harder ones will help. Do not, after that point, be surprised if the questions on the test don't seem nearly as hard as they ought to be--that almost sent me into a panic, when I neared the end of each section and things still seemed too easy to be doing well. It's okay.

No matter what method you use, you're going to need solid math and English skills to begin with. This can't give you those, but it's a good way to get used to the maddening sentence correction and data sufficiency questions that are like nothing you've ever had before. Time and practice and the brain you were born with will get you the best possible score, so I'd skip the expensive prep courses. You can find the easy-to-middling questions elsewhere, the hard ones here, and once you've finished this set, the test will be much less intimidating.

I had done a bunch of studying before this book (beginning with Princeton Review, then "math workout" books by Princeton Review and GMAC, methodical plowing through the official guide, and even some surreal time spent with crazy Barron's GMAT prep). This was just what I needed to regain some humility a few weeks before taking the test. The questions are indeed hard and I got a lot of them wrong. To me, that was a really good thing. You can lull yourself into a false sense of security with the other books because they are geared for 600-650 scores. Don't get me wrong - those are good scores - but if you are determined to break through 700 then you need a book that will light a fire under your rear. The reason I say this book is silly is because throughout the book it has these tips that use the language: "An 800 test taker recognizes..." or "An 800 test take is able to..." To me, that's a little corny and insane. But after you start to feel a little bored by the other books, give this one a try. You can get through it in very little time (the type is big and the margins are wide) - even though it's thick, it goes very quickly.

I saw this book at the bookshop *3 days* before my GMAT and spent the entire weekend with it. The book helped polish my analytical as well as passage reading skills. My final score is 760; I would guess that without this book I would not have gone beyond 720 and might have stalled at 700. It is also a little wistful to think of what I could have scored had I got it two weeks earlier. But enough about me; the book is meant as additional preparation for someone who has already read a "normal" preparatory book. In my case I read Barron's, it does not really matter which you have. All problems except essay questions are tackled here. The problems are a bit tougher than the ones you get on a typical GMAT and you may be surprised at frequently getting the answers wrong initially (this is not good 3 days before the exam!). But going through them will give you a solid preparation for whatever ETS throws at you. Everything - logic problems, passage reading, sentence correction and mathematical questions - are quality material. If you are serious about getting a high score I would recommend checking this out at your local bookstore. Again, do not read this before having already finished an initial preparatory book (and doing well with its problems).

Although I thought this book would be very helpful in my quest to score well on the GMAT, I found that all of the questions in the book can also be found in the Kaplan study guides. That's right, if you take the Kaplan course, you will get the same questions in your CD-Rom and online resources as those offerred in the book. So if you're not in the Kaplan course, this book will probably serve its purpose. However, if you ponied up the money for the Kaplan course, buy a different book.