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AleksandrM
- Legendary Member
- Posts: 566
- Joined: Fri Jan 04, 2008 11:01 am
- Location: Philadelphia
- Thanked: 31 times
- GMAT Score:640
Here is the deal:
I took my first CAT using PR, scored 480; this was after about a month of studying. I then took Kaplan two weeks later, scored 550. Have been doing OG for the last three weeks, and see that it is a real treat. Today, I took my third CAT using the second test from PR, and scored a 490.
I went to all three exams and read every single quant and verbal question and answer choices. Here are my conclusions:
1. Princeton structures and words their questions in a way that should lead you to use their strategies. This is especially true on the math part. Their questions were not readily given to solving using traditional mathematical methods (which is absolutely true of OG. Almost all of the math is readily given to traditional mathematical setups and equations).
2. Their verbal is extremely poorly phrased and structured. The answer choices the choose to present often appear to be testing another concept. For example, they will ask you to find a proper conclusion to a CR question, but the answer choices will be phrased as if the question is asking you to make an inference.
3. There were some questions on CR that actually required you to mentally finish writing the passage for them in order to choose the answer. I am not talking about the question type that actually asks you to finish the thought for them. No...no... I mean, the passage does not appear to be finished. When I looked at some of the explanations, the question required you to draw a conclusion, infer absolutely outside of the scope of the argument, and then do what the question actually asked you to do...resolve the paradox.
4. On the math section, there quite a few questions that were pretty vague. In other words, if a certain piece of information was present, the answer would be, say, D. But if you are supposed to assume that we are to deal without that piece of information, then the answer is A.
This is all pretty frustrating. If anyone else found this to be true, please let me know. I am curious to see what others think of the tests.
From now on, I am sticking to Kaplan (which isn't exactly stellar, mostly because of the way they smudge together their CR stimulus with the questions and the answer choices). I am yet to try MGMAT, and I have only heard good things about the GMATPrep software.
I took my first CAT using PR, scored 480; this was after about a month of studying. I then took Kaplan two weeks later, scored 550. Have been doing OG for the last three weeks, and see that it is a real treat. Today, I took my third CAT using the second test from PR, and scored a 490.
I went to all three exams and read every single quant and verbal question and answer choices. Here are my conclusions:
1. Princeton structures and words their questions in a way that should lead you to use their strategies. This is especially true on the math part. Their questions were not readily given to solving using traditional mathematical methods (which is absolutely true of OG. Almost all of the math is readily given to traditional mathematical setups and equations).
2. Their verbal is extremely poorly phrased and structured. The answer choices the choose to present often appear to be testing another concept. For example, they will ask you to find a proper conclusion to a CR question, but the answer choices will be phrased as if the question is asking you to make an inference.
3. There were some questions on CR that actually required you to mentally finish writing the passage for them in order to choose the answer. I am not talking about the question type that actually asks you to finish the thought for them. No...no... I mean, the passage does not appear to be finished. When I looked at some of the explanations, the question required you to draw a conclusion, infer absolutely outside of the scope of the argument, and then do what the question actually asked you to do...resolve the paradox.
4. On the math section, there quite a few questions that were pretty vague. In other words, if a certain piece of information was present, the answer would be, say, D. But if you are supposed to assume that we are to deal without that piece of information, then the answer is A.
This is all pretty frustrating. If anyone else found this to be true, please let me know. I am curious to see what others think of the tests.
From now on, I am sticking to Kaplan (which isn't exactly stellar, mostly because of the way they smudge together their CR stimulus with the questions and the answer choices). I am yet to try MGMAT, and I have only heard good things about the GMATPrep software.
