| GMAT Books You Must Buy |
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Many people refer to OG as the Bible of GMAT prep. But it’s so much more than that. The Official Guide is the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, and the Gita of GMAT prep. Every person should buy these books because they are the only GMAT materials that feature real (but retired) test questions.
If you have time, do all the problems in OG. If you are under time constraints, emphasize the last 100 or so questions from each section, as they tend to contain the most recently retired GMAT questions and also tend to be the hardest questions of each section. [Note: this advice refers to OG 10, but is applicable to the latest OG 11 as well–questions in the latest book are also listed in increasingly levels of difficulty.]
Be sure to carefully analyze your mistakes and to read the explanations to ALL the problems. GMAC likes to test the same patterns over and over again in their tests; on my actual GMAT many of the quant problems were virtual replicas of the problems I saw in OG. Be keen on learning these patterns–this can only be done through rigorous practice.
I recommend buying all three OG books, but if you're on a budget get the yellow book.
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| Other Good GMAT Books |
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Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction Guide : My one big regret about my own GMAT preparation was that I didn’t purchase this book. I just recently reviewed this book and have concluded that the MGMAT SC Guide is absolutely amazing–I think I could have improved my verbal score by 3 raw score points had I studied this textbook.
In general, Manhattan GMAT study guides are great to study from, but this SC guide stands way at the top of all sentence correction books I've seen to date. This book is a worthwhile investment, especially for non-native English speakers!
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Princeton Review's Cracking the GMAT with DVD : A lot of people bad mouth this book because they complain that PR’s practice questions are too easy, and that the book in general isn’t too helpful for people who wish to score 700+ on the GMAT. In my opinion, some of their complaints are valid. The problems do seem a bit basic; it seems that PR is designed specifically for people who wish to score in the 500s or 600s.
However, if you are starting off your GMAT studies without any prior knowledge of the GMAT (like I did), of all the books I have reviewed, PR offers the best introduction to the test. What makes this book terrific is that it is an easy read. The authors of PR have a great sense of humor and they organize their material well.
I liked the practice tests that were featured on the PR CD (now it's a DVD). Do them all if you have the time. Watch out for practice CAT 2 though–I found a bug in the scoring algorithm.
I highly recommend people to read the PR book first in their prep. From this book you’ll get a good sense of what this test is all about as well as pick up some handy general test-taking strategies.
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Kaplan GMAT Premier Program (w/ CD-ROM) :
This book also offers a good introduction to the GMAT. It is not as readable as the PR book, but the Kaplan book is certainly more thorough and features rigorous practice problems.
A special caveat to those people unfamiliar with Kaplan: Do not worry too much if you have difficulty solving Kaplan’s practice problems. They are very hard–much harder than what you will see on the actual GMAT.
IMPORTANT WARNING: Do not fret about your Kaplan practice test scores. The scores tend to be skewed down dramatically–from 70-120 points below what you should actually expect on your real exam (what I’ve noticed anecdotally). Nevertheless, it’s still worth practicing the tests on the Kaplan CD because you should have as much GMAT simulation as possible before your real exam.
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Kaplan GMAT Math Workbook :
Formerly known as the Kaplan GRE & GMAT Math Workbook. I’m lukewarm about this book. I didn’t find it too useful in my preparation. At first, I thought I was going to like this book because it seemed to comprehensively cover the fundamentals of GMAT math–which it does in fact do adequately. However, by the time I finished I felt like this book was too basic and didn’t offer much strategy.
This book may be well suited for people who have been out of college for a long time or have not touched math in a long time. But the regular Kaplan and Princeton Review books are probably sufficient to cover the fundamentals. Save your money.
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Kaplan GMAT 800 :
I bought this book on a spontaneous Amazon.com shopping spree. What surprised me about this book is that it does not offer that many practice problems, in comparison with the aforementioned books. However, it does feature very thorough and very clear explanations to each problem. This is a great book to buy if you are looking for decent strategies to obtain a 700+.
Kaplan 800’s advanced math review is simply fabulous. The math review alone is reason enough to buy this book. However, the few practice problems the book does offer are insanely difficult, probably more so than any question you'll likely encounter on the actual GMAT.
Purchase this book and review it slowly, if you have the time.
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| MBA Admissions Books You Must Buy |
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How To Get Into the Top MBA Programs :
Such a fantastic book on MBA admissions! Montauk thoroughly analyzes every element of a business school application, and provides plenty of real life examples from candidates and Admissions Officers. I was blown away by the depth of the author's research.
It’s a really long book but a surprisingly quick read. People who are serious about applying to the top 10 MBA programs should definitely buy this book!
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