Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic practice and tips, August 25, 2007
I first bought the regular Kaplan GMAT 2007 study guide and it helped me get a general overview of the GMAT questions, format, and some basic practice. But I found that it lacked the most difficult questions (especially in the Quantitative section), and although I got 96% of those right on the practice exams they were far easier than the ones I faced on the real GMAT. So I ended up with a 630 (78th percentile) and was disappointed. I then went out and bought this GMAT 800 book for more practice and "the toughest questions," and found it really very useful. It does away with the lengthy text about strategies and gets down to the questions themselves, focusing on different types of tricky questions that the GMAT test makers love to pose. I suppose it worked, since I just took the GMAT again (about 6 weeks later, having only used this book to study for about a week) and scored 750 (98th percentile)!! I highly recommend this, although you need to at least skim through the other one (or a similar guide) first to get the hang of the GMAT format and different question types before using this book.
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56 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Useful supplement to official GMAT guides, August 11, 2007
Now that the GMAT has issued a revised 11th edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Review, plus new supplementary official guides for both the verbal and quantitative sections of the test, the case for spending additional hard-earned money and scarce study time on the Kaplan review prep book is not as strong as it used to be. On the other hand, a case can be made. While the questions in the official GMAT books have the advantage of being actual test questions rather than Kaplan attempts to emulate the well vetted questions written by ETS (and recently Pearson Vue), most of the official guides' questions have already appeared in the 10th edition of the official GMAT guide, which means that if you have the previous edition, you won't get much additional questions by buying the newer official GMAT books. Although the new GMAT books offer what the publisher calls "improved" explanations, many of the explanations for the reading passages and analytic reasoning sections are still useless and circular -- like answer D is correct because answer D is, uhm, correct. (I find the math explanations to be adequate, however.) In addition, because the computer administered test is adaptive, offering harder questions as you continue to get right answers, the Official Guide GMAT book questions won't be representative of the actual mix you will get when you actually take the test, particularly if you are likely to be a high scorer, in which case the hardest 20% in the GMAT book will be more likely to represent the actual questions you will be answering.
Kaplan, on the other hand, makes more of an attempt to offer insightful explanations to test questions, even if their answers are at times deficient. Kaplan also offers advice on test strategy with regard to timing, using process of elimination, and ways of coping with particularly difficult questions or reading passages, which GMAT seems to be reluctant to do. In other words, the Kaplan approach is more like true coaching, as opposed to offering just a bunch of practice test questions. In summary, I would say that this is a useful addition to the preparation arsenal, although the main focus should still be on the official GMAT preparation materials.
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not 800, but not bad, August 24, 2006
GMAT 800 is a very popular book. Whoever at Kaplan came up with the name ought to get a raise and an immediate promotion to the head of the marketing department. Everybody wants an 800, and we'd all like to think that working really hard through the materials in one book will get us there.
Of course, that's ridiculous. This book claims to have the "hardest problems," and while it has a few, that's just not true. A better title would be "GMAT 720." That's not to say the book isn't worthwhile. It probably does have more difficult problems than any other popular book on the market--it certainly contains more than any other Kaplan book or the Official Guides.
I am disappointed, however, with the way material is distributed in this book. The hardest questions on the GMAT aren't equally divided among every content area: there's more difficult Data Sufficiency than Problem Solving and more probability than algebra. However, there are only a handful of probability questions in this book, and the Problem Solving/Data Sufficiency split is heavily weighted toward the former. There are indeed more Problem Solving questions on the GMAT, but high-scoring students aiming for the top need Data Sufficiency practice more.
If you are scoring 650 or better and aim higher, this is a great book to have. However, don't put too much stock in the tips--they aren't explained terribly well, and in my opinion they aren't even the best methods to do some of their problems. If you can comfortably do every question in this book in a reasonable amount of time, you may not get a perfect score, but you'll do very well.
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