ARCO CAT

Hello everyone. I just finished writing my GMAT today and i think i might be in a position to review and compare the boks i used.

I started with Barrons, then Arc's and then Kaplan. Based on my experience i would say the Arco book was head and shoulders above the rest.

Barons- in old format, test on C is just repeat of paper tests- overall the worst book of the 3 I used. However the paper tests really help to build up stamina and concentration. If you write the two essays and do 7 sections of test, the final CAT wont seem so long.

Arco- The 3 cats on the CD are phenonemenal. ow that i have completed the real test i can say that these cats are very similar to the real CAT. Both the math and verbal section are of a difficulty level very close to what u will see in the real test. Also the questions are just as well written and u can see that alot of thought has gone into it and that it has been proof-read well. The 6 paper tests are quite good in terms of the verbal sections. The math in the paper tests is way too simple.

Kaplan- The 4 tests on the CD seem way harder than the real test. In addition the questions are poorly worded and often times explainations conflict (for instance in one question was 0 was considered an even integer, but in another 0 was not even considered an integer). There are numerous errors in the reading comprehension passages and you can see that not much attention has been paid to the questions. Looks like Kaplan just wanted to make the tests hard by choosing ridiculous RC's that are too long and have only 3 questions.. Anyway it is good practice all the same.

i can only comment on the practice tests because my strat for preparation was only to do practice tests. The only thing other than the tests i did was the sentence correction question sets in arco, kaplan and powerprep.

Anyways i ended up with a score of 770. I plan on writing more about my prep strat in the other forum....

I hope this helps some people in deciding on which books to use.

Thank you Gmatclub for providing information and much needed moral support during the tough prep days.. and good luck to everyone else on the test.

One question dexterslab - Was this the Master the GMAT 2006 by ARCO Gold or some other book? A link to amazon's listing... perhaps?

Also, which editions (2006, 2005? etc.) of the various books did you use? Did you e.g. use a 2005 version of the Kaplan by any chance?

Any knowledge of whether a particular book changed significantly between editions?

Thanks much and of course, major congratulations!

Hi Olorin,

Yes it is Master the GMAT arco's 2006 edition. Kaplan was 2006 edition- premier program and Barrons was how to prepare for the gmat-13th edition. I bought all of them at Borders, dont really have an amazon link.

dexterslab - congrats on an awesome score!

Thanks much for the answer!

And once again congratulations! How's the partying going?

Are you guys talking about the Cambridge CAT or something else?