Veritas Book Set for GMAT

ah ok. if you had not realized, the first review from amazon is from BB, founder of this website. He has also posted the same review somewhere on the forum.

I had asked the same question about the quality of Veritas Prep material to BB before and I had gathered from his reluctance to comment that they sucked. I guess his opinions might have changed now. I will let you decide. I have included a quote of my exchange with BB below

best-gmat-math-prep-books-reviews-recommendations-77291-80.html

youven thanks again.Yeah i saw the founder's review on one of the books. However he did not comment on the full set. The reviews on the full set seem a little fishy. If you check the other reviews for each of the people who commented , you will see that most of them only have reviews for the Veritas GMAT books. They did not write any reviews for other books/products.
Btw, the set is now for 299 $ on Amazon. Do you think i should get it?
Any way i can get the attention of BB to this post and get his advice?

You can always PM him. He is pretty good at responding. If you have the MGMAT series, I would definitely not get the Veritas Prep books. Then again, this is just my 2 cents.

Hi score780,

I work for Veritas Prep, so obviously I'm biased about how good our books are, but I wanted to shed a little more light on the question of why you might buy our books after buying Manhattan GMAT's books.

If you have the Manhattan GMAT books and are still looking for additional resources, I can assure you that the Veritas Prep books will not be redundant with what you’ve already studied. In addition to presenting over 1,000 new practice problems, the books will provide you with a strategic framework for approaching each question type and concept area on the GMAT. With the insight that the GMAT is more a test of “how you think” than of “what you know" (GMAC itself emphasizes this constantly), the Veritas Prep books are designed to take the GMAT content covered in other lessons and build upon it, demonstrating proven strategies to deconstruct the way that questions are written and to play the logical mind game that the GMAT uses to create difficulty.

As an example, and noting that this thread has already mentioned Data Sufficiency, the Veritas Prep Data Sufficiency book has an entire “what if” section that takes existing questions and poses “what ifs” – what if the inequality sign in the question were flipped? What if the first statement said “non-negative” instead of “positive”? Those kinds of thought processes are critical to success on difficult questions -– if you can think of all of the possibilities in any given question, you can learn to anticipate the subtlety that the GMAT authors use to add difficulty. As the difference between sufficient (e.g. “always yes”) and insufficient (e.g. “usually yes, but there’s one exception") is often slight and may come down to that one number that you didn’t consider, learning to test the boundaries of Data Sufficiency statements is extremely important, and the Veritas Prep books are designed to show students the ways in which the authors test those boundaries, and to train you to think the same way.

Hope that helps!

Scott

Just to clarify, the main reason I have not included the Veritas books in the listing before, was that they were the cost of a prep course ($450) and did not seem feasible as a self-study option. (I did not say they were of poor quality). There are many books that are not on that list and most of the time the reason is that they are not good enough, so no need to list junk. This set is different. It is a great contender to the Manhattan GMAT Guides and is highly recommended. I think it is on par or better than the MGMAT guides though does not come with a set of tests.

I am including those in the Book Reviews thread (there are a few other things I need to revise there, but thank you for giving me a nudge)

Here is my review: veritas-prep-books-vs-manhattan-gmat-books-96701.html

Great! Thank you all. I am sorry for the late reply, i was on a business trip. I already ordered the books on Amazon. They end up being much cheaper there.

thanks again for all your answers.

I used couple of books from Veritas: Probability, and Stats and problem solving. These are most thorough quant books I have ever read. Veritas' Probability book has no match. I just read first few chapters from the Stats and problem solving book and found this book equally good.

Manhattan's probability concepts are not as thorough. Manhattan's Number properties and Inequality books are excellent.

Thanks getmba!

my first post here. veritas does have great books and their probability book is outstanding. the MGMAT books are also good but I feel the Veritas books do a better job of explaining some of the trickier concepts.

either way as long as you put in the time i guess you should be good. got a 580 first try , retaking soon after studying from veritas books.

my 2 cents - i got Veritas Probability book , i had manhattan book covering probability and i also tried to learn this topic from gmatclub - math open book.By far i found out that Veritas probability book is best.
This book covers all topics and all question types such as circular table, conditions etc.This book has many questions and detailed explanations. I can say that after reading this book I am comfortable with this topic.

Some of the great concepts found in first few chapters of Statistics and problem solving book are:

1. If all the terms of a set are INCREASED by a constant number, then the new mean will be equal to what?
2. If all the terms of a set are DECREASED by a constant number, then the new mean will be equal to what?
3. If all the terms of a set are MULTIPLIED by a constant number, then the new mean will be equal to what?
4. How will the Standard Deviation vary if we multiply each term of a set with an absolute value greater than 1 or less than 1?
5. How will the Standard Deviation vary if we Divide each term of a set with an absolute value greater than 1 or less than 1?
6. What effect it would have on standard deviation if we change the sign of all terms (or in other words multiply by -1)
7. Can SD be bigger than half of the range?

This book implores you to think from different angles. There are lots of What if scenarios covered in the book. I hope I am not violating any copyright information in this post. Moderator, please feel free to edit this post if you observe any copyright violation information.

If you have around 3 months to prepare for GMAT, then it wouldn't hurt to add these books in your Armour especially now when you can buy these books individually (if I am right).

- getmba

I'm also using Veritas's books on SC and CR. I think these books are really good. If you are falling short of time and don't have time to go through PowerScore CR Bible, go through Veritas's CR. It's concise and covering all the topics.

As said above by getmba, there is no match for Veritas's probability book. One must go through this if one wants higher score on quant.