55 of 56 people found the following review helpful
The best! Highly Recommended,
October 3, 2004 mak17f (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: GMAT Prep Course (Prep Course Series) (Paperback)
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...Read more
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
A VERY DECENT BOOK",
March 31, 2000 M. Razib Haque (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Gmat Prep Course (Paperback)
Basically if you would like to have good book which teaches you fundamental principles then it is a very good book. I did not like the SOFTWARE. But Math section is very good and very clear. If you are looking for some short cut then this is not the real book. But you would like to work hard and prepare for the high and medium difficulty questions then this is good book. But DONT buy this book for the software. For the software GMAT POWERPREP will be the best in my opinion.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
An excellent preparatory text,
February 8, 2005 J. Morrissey (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: GMAT Prep Course (Prep Course Series) (Paperback)
I am very happy with this book. After reading numerous reviews about this and other GMAT guides, I chose this one. It was not easy to find in bookstores, which largely carry the more familiar titles(Kaplan, etc.) I bought the book around Christmas.
I felt pretty rusty with much of the material(I've been out of school for a while), so I started working my way through the book a little at a time, somewhat haphazardly. Then I actually registered for the GMAT three weeks ago, and suddenly my sense of urgency got more intense.
Now then, the review:
I found that the coverage of the mathematics topics and the verbal topics to be thorough and comprehensive. I was able to re-familiarize myself with the material pretty quickly, and my performance on the test questions in the book improved a great deal. Similarly, I was able to improve my performance on the Verbal questions, although I found that section much harder to get into. This was more a function of...Read more