Kaplan "rant"

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DanaJ: Site Admin; Posts: 2567; Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2009 10:05 amFollowed by: 550 members; Thanked: 712 times; GMAT Score:770

by DanaJ » Mon Apr 20, 2009 12:59 pm

Before I start cursing or anything, I want to make smth clear: Kaplan's by far my fave. Barron's was a waste of money, but I don't regret buying Kaplan Premier and Kaplan 800. It's great that they have an "instructions, tips and how-to's" section before jumping to the practice questions; this is, IMHO, the weakest point of the OG. They sort of compensate each other nicely: Kaplan has the explanations/tips, OG has the ton of official/real questions.

HOWEVER

If they got the books right, why the hell did they get the tests so screwed up?! I thought that maybe people were exaggerating when they said that Kaplan scores are not reliable indicators; well, I got a taste of that today. After registering, I decided to take one of their tests. Finished quant with 35 mins to spare and had THREE wrong answers out of 37, all "miles" apart. No way my real quant score is 46...

Sorry for the rant, I just felt really bad about this...Moderators, feel free to erase this message....

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Source: Beat The GMAT — GMAT Strategy | Mon Apr 20, 2009 12:59 pm

T_A_M: Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts; Posts: 43; Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2009 2:02 am; Thanked: 2 times

by T_A_M » Mon Apr 20, 2009 1:30 pm

Thanks DanaJ
Agree OG11 is good for practise questions but I believe it falls apart when it comes to explaining the topic. I have found Kaplan & more recently MGMAT bar the most useful. MGMAT guides and online questions banks are excellent. The MGMAT SC guide is partticularly useful.

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4seasoncentre: Master | Next Rank: 500 Posts; Posts: 211; Joined: Thu Apr 09, 2009 12:17 pm; Thanked: 12 times; GMAT Score:680

Re: Kaplan "rant"

by 4seasoncentre » Mon Apr 20, 2009 4:16 pm

DanaJ wrote:Finished quant with 35 mins to spare and had THREE wrong answers out of 37, all "miles" apart. No way my real quant score is 46...

maybe it is?

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DanaJ: Site Admin; Posts: 2567; Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2009 10:05 amFollowed by: 550 members; Thanked: 712 times; GMAT Score:770

by DanaJ » Thu Apr 23, 2009 4:23 am

Kaplan rant over after my first test w/ score 800 (q55, v55) o.O

Impressions so far: Kaplan CATs quant is slightly different from the rest of the CATs I've taken so far. It's not necessarily more difficult, it's more "academic", so to speak. It's just my type of maths, but I perfectly understand why someone out of school for more than 3 years would find this stuff utterly terrifying.

Oh, and the scoring algorithm seems to be messed up just for the free CAT. The rest of them are truly OK. I think this is not the fairest way to do business; some have already pointed out that Kaplan usually skews results in order to get more students to sign up for the teacher/tutor programs and I believe that this claim is justified.

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