yerlan wrote:
Hello. My name is Yerlan. I am from Almaty (Kazakhstan). Me and my friend here had chosen to take GMAT and we want apply for some 1,5 year MBA program. We want to pass GMAT test. Our goal is to get scholarship at some good business school in USA or Canada. We have no experience at GMAT at all but we both have some background. We both have higher education. We analyzed materials available for GMAT preparation; also analyzed Amazon ratings for different books, and decided to buy one of these:
“
The Official Guide for GMAT Review 2016” - 840 pages (with Quantitative and Verbal review from Official Bundle it will be 1392 pages)
Or
“Manhattan Complete GMAT Strategy Guide Set” – 1912 pages
We are planning to apply to some business school in January 2016. Roughly, we have 4 month to prepare. We have a question to GMAT experts. Can you please give us some advice what will be better to choose for preparation taking into account our current level and available time. Is it possible to get high score by preparing with “
The Official Guide for GMAT Review”? I am afraid that we won’t be able to be in time if we go with “Manhattan Complete GMAT Strategy Guide Set” because we have 4 months for preparation.
4 months – 120 day.
To finish Manhattan Guide it will take 15 pages per day. (i guess it will be pretty hard)
To finish
The Official Guide it will take 7 pages per day ( or 12 pages if it is whole bundle)
Based on your experience can you tell us what will be better to go with in order to prepare for GMAT. We want high scores because we really hope to get generous scholarship.
Thanks!
Yerlan -
Excellent questions and good summary of your background and goals. While
the Official Guide provides actual questions from previous tests (which is great in getting a feel for the how questiosn are asked and how the test makers actually test the concepts), the Manhattan Guide will actually get into the strategy of taking the exam. That is, how you might approach certain types of problems or how the test makers try to bait you into choosing an incorrect answer. If possible, purchase both. You really will not have to go through every page of either set of books - as, particularly in
the Official Guide, many of the pages are just problems. Further, the Manhattan Guide will provide you with high level and higher difficulty problems in the Quant section which can prove to be very beneficial.
Think of it this way - the GMAT is not a test of "what you know", it is more a test of "how you think". So, drilling the fundamental concepts only will get you to a balf-way to scoring a top flight score. The test makers will expect you to know the fundamentals but then to be apply them to unfamiliar or unique questions. Getting a feel for the types of questions and how the concepts are tested (via
the Official Guide) is very helpful, but understanding the strategy of the exam and different approaches (via Manahattan) will really assist you in scoring in the upper ranges.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any additional questions.