tl;dr Best CATs to take in order (in my opinion!): GMAT Prep, Kaplan/Manhattan, Economist, Veritas. Stay away from GMATPill.I'm stressing too much from apps; so, I've decided to take a break and write a review for all the CATs I've taken. But first, a few notes:
1. I haven't taken the free Kaplan CAT, but took the 4 (out of 5) CATs with Kaplan Premier 2014. I will assume these are similar.
2. Please remember this is a review on their
Free CAT exam - this review has no bearing on their ability to prepare or teach you.
3. I'm sure companies have an evolving process and these reviews may no longer be applicable if you're reading this years later. I have personally found all the information regarding Kaplan's CAT exams being harder than the real GMAT frustrating - all the info I found were years old and I believe they've changed this recently as I find Kaplan's exams to be easier.
4. It's been a month since I've taken most of these. Hopefully my memory is good!
Here's the list of all the exams I took:
8/27, kaplan cat1, 710, Q51, V29, IR4
9/14, kaplan cat2, 750, Q51, V33, IR8
9/17, manhattangmat, 690, Q48, V36, IR6.53
9/21, economist, 730, Q50, V41, IR?
9/24, kaplan cat3, 720, Q51, V34, IR8
9/28, gmat pill, 740, Q49, V42, IR6
9/28, gmat prep 1, 700, Q50, V34, IR8
9/29, kaplan cat4, 710, Q50, V38, IR7
10/1, Veritas, 690, Q50, V35, IR4
10/5, gmat prep 2, 680, Q49, V33, IR8
10/9, Real GMAT, 740, Q51, V38, IR8
Kaplan: The exams are great overall. No real major flaw. The look and feel is exactly like the GMAT - and the only exam I've taken (other than GMATPrep) to have done that. My first complaint are the scores. I feel Kaplan consistently scored me higher than where I actually was. This led me to have a false sense of security - I kept feeling really confident until I took the GMATPrep - and then I started to panic. They also just have some funky errors regarding their analysis and breakdowns of the exam, and probably their scoring as well. Nevertheless, this doesn't affect the quality of the exam - just note that the scoring and their analysis may be off. Second minor complaint involves the calculator in the IR section. You couldn't have the calculator open and fill in the answers at the same time - had to close calculator first.
MGMAT: Again, great exam overall. The quant was harder than the actual exam. The look and feel bothered me a lot. It looked very different from the actual exam, and it was awfully annoying that I couldn't select the answer choice line - I had to select the radio button itself, and this extremely hard. Clicking "Next" and going on to the next question was also different in some way from what I remember. Again, I had issues with their calculator during IR as well - it wouldn't let me use the keyboard to use the calculator.
Economist: They didn't have an AWA or an IR section, but the quant and verbal seemed fine. They may have both been a tad on the easy side, but it's hard for me to tell (I'm basing this on the fact that I finished quant way earlier than I normally do and that my verbal score seems to be higher than normal). I really liked their review user interface that after the exam. It's the best one out of the tests I've taken. I liked how everything is on one page. Most exams you have to do a lot of back and forth reviewing the problems you got wrong. You can just click on a problem and it'll expand and show the problem below. Then they'll give their explanation of that problem on the side. Then you can click on each answer choice to see the explanation behind why that answer choice was correct or incorrect. Picture is worth a thousand words:
https://i.imgur.com/ChggjOu.png I also liked how they highlighted the times for ones where you took too long. I didn't finish the verbal in time and left the last question unanswered; unfortunately, this last question doesn't appear on the review
Veritas: For me, their CAT result was the most on par with my GMATPrep scores. Take that for what you will. Their verbal and math portions were fine. However, their IR was terrible. After the first four questions, I skipped this portion. They had very unclear pictures of graphs, very different multi-source reasoning than what you would normally encounter, bad questions in general - I'm just chalking this up to the fact that IR is new and hopefully it'll get better. They also definitely had calculator issues like the others.
GMATPill: Their practice test is just terrible - stay away from it. A lot of the questions aren't even fully formulated - you need to guess what the question is asking for. I had an IR question where they just gave me a table without the blurb explaining the table. I've had Sentence Correction questions where the underlined portion was different than the answer choices. Answer choices are sometimes intelligible. On one of my verbal questions, the choice for C) was literally just the letter "D" whereas the other four choices were each a sentence. For the math section, they claim you need to use chrome as some of the formulas don't show, but even with chrome, some things appear as gibberish. Many questions are also stolen directly from the
OG and/or GMATPrep, so if you've done those, you'll be seeing a lot of repeat questions. The appearance of the exam is terrible, with fonts change from question to question or even answer choices to answer choices. The functionality of their pause button isn't working as intened... and I could go on. The most annoying thing of all is that after you spend hours taking the exam, they don't allow you to see your result,
UNLESS you have a facebook account and "like" GMATPILL, message your friends about it, post on your timeline, etc.
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04 Oct 2013, 02:11
