Official Guide, 2015 Edition: What Do You Need to Know?
GMAC just released new 2015 editions of its three The Official Guide for GMATReview books. Heres what you need to know as you decide whether to buy these books and how to use them.
What changed?
The three books in question are The Official Guide for GMAT Review 2015 (formerly known as the 13th edition of the Official Guide, or OG), The Official Guide for GMAT Quantitative Review 2015 (formerly known as the 2nd edition of the Quant Review), and The Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review 2015 (formerly known as the 2nd edition of the Verbal Review). Ill refer to these throughout this article as OG2015, QR2015, and VR2015, respectively.
The questions (and explanations) contained in all three 2015 versions are the same as the questions (and explanations) in the previous versions. There are no new questions.
The new editions do come with special codes to access an online software program that contains the problems from the books. Now, when you want to do a set of random OG problems, you dont have to create the sets for yourselfyou can have the online software do it for you. (OG2015 also still provides online access to the 50 Integrated Reasoning questions that come with the 13th edition of the book.)
The online software also has some short videos (one for each book) starring the incomparable Dr. Lawrence Rudner, Chief Psychometrician for GMAC, answering frequently asked questions from students.
How does the software work?
The software for all three books gives you the ability to choose Practice mode or Exam mode. In addition, OG2015 offers a Diagnostic test mode that contains the questions from chapter 3 of the printed book.
Certain features are offered in all three modes:
- Question Type, Number, and Difficulty. You can choose from among the different question types (PS, DS, SC, CR, RC), as well as by difficulty bucket (easy, medium, hard, or all). You can also decide how many questions you want to be in the set.
- Timing. The software will keep track of how much time you spend per question, as well as your overall time for that set of questions. (It does not, though, give you a time limit, so you will have to set one for yourself.)
- Bookmarks. You can bookmark problems that you want to remember for some reasonmaybe your guesses or the ones that you want to try again before checking the answer or explanation.
- Calculator. Yes, the software offers a calculator, even though youre not allowed to use a calculator on the quant section of the real test. My recommendation: pretend this button doesnt exist.
- Pause. You can pause the question set. This is useful if someone suddenly rings your doorbell, but do not pause the software while continuing to work on the problem. Otherwise, your data will be skewed and you wont really be able to tell what your strengths and weaknesses are.
In the Diagnostic and Exam modes, you can only move forward in the question set (as on the real exam), but in Practice mode, you can move back and forth. If you come back to a problem for the second time, the software will actually remember how much time you spent before and will start counting your time where you left off! I was really impressed with this feature.
I do have to warn you about three other somewhat-faulty features (maybe these will be changed in future). First, when you click to go to the next question, the software does not ask you to confirm. Thats fine in Practice mode, where youre allowed to go backwards, but in Diagnostic and Exam modes, if you accidentally click next question, you will be moved to the next problem even if you have not yet entered an answerand there is no way to go back.
Second, in any of the three modes, youll be able to go to a results screen when done with a question set. For both Exam and Practice modes, these question sets will be saved and youll be able to review them at any time in the future. In Diagnostic mode, however, you can only see the results screen right after you have finished the problem set. Once you close out of that area (or out of the software entirely), that data will disappear, so make sure you take screen shots of the results screen before you leave that area of the program. (In fact, I recommend taking the screen shots immediately after finishing a Diagnostic set. I accidentally clicked something that took me out of that part of the program and lost all of my data before I could review it.)
Third, in both Practice and Exam modes, the RC questions are offered one at a time, not in sets of 3 or 4 (as on the real test). For this reason, I recommend doing RC questions out of the physical book. Reading an entire passage only to answer a single question is not a good use of study time.
I was also excited to see that the Practice mode offered a notes feature, where you can actually type notes to yourself while working on the problem. I was disappointed that those notes seemed to disappear afterwards. When I was reviewing the results screen and the problem explanations, I couldnt find any way to access my notes again.
How do I get the most out of these new books?
If you already have the previous incarnations of these books (OG13, VR2, and QR2), then I dont actually recommend buying the new editions unless money is not a concern for you. The most important thing is to have access to the questions themselves. While the new software does make it much easier to set up problem sets,many people probably arent going to pay $46 just for that.
If you dont yet have these books, though, then of course youll want to get the 2015 editions. In that case, heres how I would use the new features:
1. In the first week or two of your study, take the Diagnostic mode tests. I would do these in 5 separate sittings, one for each question type. You dont need to set yourself a hard overall time limit, but do pay attention to that clock and be honest with yourself when a problem just isnt happening. Guess and move on. (Note: if youre taking our class, then you can dispense with this step and save the problems for review later in your studies.)
2. As you work through whatever material youre using to learn all about the math, grammar, and question types tested on the GMAT, you will initially try just a couple of OG problems that directly test whatever you recently studied. In this case, you wont be using the OG software because the software doesnt let you select by topic.
After you get at least halfway through your study material though (e.g., about 3 of our 5 quant books, or halfway through the chapters in the SC book), you can start to set up random sets of questions for yourself using the softwares Practice mode. When youre offered a question on a topic you havent studied yet, just do your best; this will help you to have an idea of your strengths and weaknesses so that you know how much time to spend when you do get to that topic.
Whether you want to do random sets of problems or choose specific topics, here are some guidelines for creating your own OG problem sets.
3. Save Exam mode for a bit later in your studies, after youve been through all your main material once. Both Practice and Exam modes are pulling from the same pool of questions, but Exam mode imposes some additional restrictions that make your practice closer to the real test (for example, you cant go back to questions that youve already completed).
In sum
Everyone should be studying with the Official Guide materialsnothing is better than the real thing! If you already have the 13th edition or 2nd edition books, dont feel that you must buy the 2015 editions, but if you dont, then certainly get the latest versions and take advantage of the new online problem set program.
Happy studying!