Customer Reviews

Kaplan GMAT 800, 2008-2009 Edition (Kaplan GMAT Advanced)

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

 

 

This book is good for some extra questions, but it by no means contains the hardest questions. Like numerous other reviewers of GMAT books have mentioned, the best prep is to use the official GMAT book. For the toughest questions, I would recommend doing the two tests you can download for free from mba.com when you sign up. Do those tests multiple times because while some questions remain the same, the majority change. If you get better, you'll get to the harder questions. The questions in the Kaplan GMAT 800 are of moderate difficulty. They may be somewhat hard from a straight math point of view, but the questions on the actual GMAT are slightly different and trickier in nature. As far as the strategies go, there were a couple useful ones, although they may seem obvious to some. So, to summarize, this book is a decent supplement, but don't think you'll be getting an outstanding score just because you can answer the questions in this book.

Not at a good use of time. There are not enough practice questions and the difficulty is definitely not 800 level, probably more around 650-700 as other reviewers have suggested. Surprisingly the main Kaplan book (Premier 2009) has harder questions on its CD rom, although unfortunately that book has significant problems. I've never read a book of any kind with as many errors and typos - seriously! Kaplan has really gone down hill.

The exercises are OK to improve your score. I went from mid 600s to lower 700s after working on the 2006 GMAT 800. And that is exactly why I think this book is not worth it. I went to the store to buy the latest edition of GMAT 800 and to my surprise I realized that 90% of the questions were the same as in the 2006 edition. I think it's morally wrong to sell a new edition of these types of books that it is esentially the same as previous versions.

I agree with the reviewer who says this book should be called GMAT 650-700. I was scoring in the low 700s before I got this book and found it to be a big waste of time. There are some hard 700-800 range questions, but the vast majority (like 80%) are not. I wasted a week on this book when I could've spent just a couple hours on the difficult questions, had I known which ones they were in advance. If you are shooting for 800, not 700, you're better off working off of the last questions in the Official Guide (these are purportedly the most difficult), trying out difficult math problems posted in GMAT forums and, as I did, working on your problem areas with the Manhattan GMAT quant guides. I scored a 51 on quant on the real GMAT, thanks to the Manhattan guides, NO thanks to Kaplan GMAT 800!

Maybe I'm not getting something, but I would call this book GMAT 650-700. I've got 690 on my first on-line trial test simulation (from Manhattan GMAT) and I thought this book would be a helpful guide to close my "gaps". In fact, when I went through Geometry section of this book, I've got 100% of right answers without any guessing (on the test simulation I've got only 55% of my geometry answers right and that number included some questions where I made "educated guess"). Moreover, I spend no more than 1.5 minute for each task in GMAT 800 when on the trial test I really felt that 2 minutes was not enough to deal with some geometry tasks.

Bottom line - this book might be a good review of GMAT tricks, traps and bottlenecks, but don't think it will help you to jump 50 points if you're already in 650-700 range. No miracles here.

I used this book the day before I took the GMAT just to gain some extra insight on the areas that I had the most errors on the practice tests. I was scoring about 600 - 650 on the practice tests but got a 710 on the actual exam. I found the explanations to be more helpful in this book than the official GMAT book and I believe that if I had spent more with this book I would have scored higher on the exam.

I used this book as a supplement to the official GMAT books, Kaplan course, and mba.com online tests. It gave me the extra practice I needed to master the tougher questions.

+ Comprehensive. Covers each topic with a few questions/explanations on each topic.

+ Organized by topic so you can skip to / focus on your primary areas of weakness

+ Because of the way it was structured, I didn't need to sift through a lot of information to get to the questions that I was looking for.

+ Excellent supplement to get extra practice on tough questions

- A few questions were repeats of the tougher questions in the online Kaplan GMAT course. But most of the questions were new to me after taking the Kaplan course.

I obtained this book from a friend and I thought it would be chocked full of GMAT wisdom. NOPE perhaps I just "don't" get it..since I am in the 650 range on the pretests but this book is not very good. It covers a few high level ideas one must master to be in the 700-800 range but it only gives you about 2 examples per concept. I just do no think this book is worth the money...or the time

People studying for the GMAT need to know that they can't do it without buying the GMAC official guide. Just don't do it. The Kaplan questions are good but they're not the same as the official guide. The official guide is the prime source of good questions and practice. HOWEVER, the role of Kaplan books like this is to harvest the strategies from them and use them on the practice question from the official guide. Also, if you are breaking down a math skill, some of the simpler questions may be helpful. I honestly haven't used this book much since I have a Kaplan premier book, but I don't think there's tons of new stuff. Heck, I haven't really looked at it so I don't know. Read the other reviews. But my previous point stands.

This book by no means contain the toughest questions. I've taken the test once, and believe me, it was harder. But this is not my biggest complaint about this book. Since, majority of the test banks found in GMAT books on the market are all around the same level-this one might even be a little tougher.

I simply cant stand the layout of this book!!!

I would rather have a chuck of questions and then see the answers+explanations in the next chuck!

This book would have 2-4 questions, and answers, another 2-4, another set of answers. It was driving me insane! I felt like my pace was broken and I was not able to "get in the zone".

I guess there are people that like to see the answer as soon as they are done with the problem. I simply find that distracting.

But then again, no book is perfect. It is VERY hard to find sets of questions that are identical to the real test and with comparable level of difficulties.