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

 (15 customer reviews)

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.