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.

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 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

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 like the set-up of the book. It is easy to follow and gives great tools and tips for getting a good score. The book gives you the toughest possible test questions to study. The only section that is confusing and not as thorough would be the math section.