I have finally booked my GMAT examination. I am supposed to take it on 06-Aug-2008. This action is solely to make me scare/ inspire/ push me to start studying. So far it does not seem to be working. We have to wait and see :-).
In this post, I am going to write about GMAT books that I found very useful. I will write about other GMAT resources in a different post.
The Official Guides published by the GMAC are very good and pre-requisite resources for GMAT preparation. There are 3 Official books. The first book contains nearly 800 questions for both the verbal and the quantitaive section and also discusses the AWA section. The second and third books have nearly 300 questions each and discuss the GMAT Quantitative section and the GMAT Verbal section respectively. The official guides are very good resources for problem practice. Working on the official guides is very important because they represent the actual nature of the questions that you will encounter on the GMAT. I found the explanation to questions in the guides to be adequete, but many people think that the explanations are not clear enough. I will recommend that you solve every problem in the official guides, and read the explanations of all problems, irrespective of whether you got it right or wrong.
Verbal is my biggest weakness. As a matter of fact, I am very comfortable with written and spoken English, and in most cases can identify by ear if the sentence sounds right or not. Unfortunately, this is not good enough for GMAT Sentence Correction (SC). I have a fundamental feel of grammar, and instintively determine the grammatically correct form. But I cannot define a conjunction or an adverb. The only advantage is that GMAT tests only a handful of grammatical concepts. So SC is simply identifying and applying rules. The Manhattan Sentence Correction Guide is the best resource to learn GMAT SC rules. I improved my SC scoring by nearly 5 points. This is absolutely cool. The other major advantage is that buying any one of the Manhattan books gives you access to 6 free and very good online CAT exams that you have to buy otherwise by shelling out US $25.
GMAT Critical Reasoning (CR) is pretty easy. I am pretty comfortable with CR questions. Nevertheless in order to improve my scoring abilities on this, I figured I could do some reading. I found the PowerScore GMAT CR bible very good for this. I think that the explanations and the strategy outlines are very good.
GMAT Reading Comprehension does not seem to be a big deal to me. I am not making many mistakes here, and I think that working on the official guides is sufficient.
In order to get more practice, I also got the Kaplan 800. The Kaplan 800 is a pretty good collection of difficult problems. I have not started working on this in a big way. I will soon in a week.
I also reviewed the Princeton and the Kaplan Premier books. I do not find them to be very helpful. I think that if you are pretty good at Math and the English language and are scoring above 600, these books may not be suitable for you. On the other hand if you do need to start from a more ground level, these might be the books you are looking for. I think Kaplan is much better than Princeton.
Anyway catch you later.
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