I took the Manhattan Prep GMAT prep 9-session class summer with David Mahler in New York City. I did well on my first attempt and even better on my second attempt.

The Manhattan GMAT classes/books helped me improve in those specific areas. Personally, I am a strong quantitative person but not so much on the verbal side. I had many difficulties in sentence correction and critical reasoning before I took the class. I practiced a lot of questions in the section books. The Manhattan Prep online portal is also particularly helpful in terms of taking mock exams.

I strongly recommend anybody who wants to improve greatly on their GMAT scores to take the class.

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I approached studying for the GMAT pretty seriously. I've never been a great standardized test taker so I had to put in a lot of work just to understand the GMAT. The 9-week course was very helpful for just that. I found the in-class sessions useful for learning exactly how the test should be approached. The instructor focused on strategy rather than content. I stuck to the syllabus closely and went to all but one in-class session. Even after the 9 weeks I still hadn't improved on my practice GMAT scores, in fact my best score was the test I took before the course.

After the course my instructor was willing to continue working with me to identify strengths and weaknesses. I gradually improved on practice tests to the point where I felt comfortable ~10 weeks later to take the test. I scored 50 points above my best practice test.

Everyone learns differently so I won't speak for everyone else but the GMAT definitely takes time to get comfortable with. I learn well in-class because it forces me to keep up with the homework. If you invest in the course, you'd be well off to follow the syllabus and practice practice practice problems!

Lastly, don't freak out if you don't score well on MPrep's IR problems. They are ridiculously hard and best I got on practice test was a 3 and I got a 7 on the actual test. I didn't review IR until week of official test.

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I decided to take the Manhattan Prep GMAT course because I wanted to get a 700+ score. Christine is an excellent instructor and did a good job of not only explaining the answer but WHY that answer was correct and why the other options were incorrect. The homework is well paced and all the materials provided were excellent. The books did a good job of making each subject easy to understand. I would highly recommend Manhattan Prep to anyone who is looking to get a top score. I only took the official test once, but I got under a 600 on my very first practice test so my score improved by over 100 pts.

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I thought the course was awesome. The books were great, even if you don't remember anything from high school. The roadmap book also gives a ton of great general advice for the whole prep process. The web site had a ton of great tools besides just practice tests and anytime I had a question about a specific resource, I called the office, and it seemed like there was always someone there to help.

I think it's definitely important to do a lot of the recommended readings if you want to get the most out of the class. I found that the people I spoke to who didn't do the homework were more likely to seem a bit lost or confused. But, if you walk in prepared, you know what your weaknesses are and how you want to improve, you can ask better questions.

I must say that our teacher, Jonathan Schneider, was the best. He always explained everything very clearly and made it all easy to understand. He was even extremely helpful and patient outside of the classroom. Obviously you can't expect the teachers to be able to go over specific questions in their free time, but I must have emailed him at least 15 different general study questions and he always answered in a friendly manner within about 24 hours. I kept thinking, "How am I not annoying him yet?"

I took the test about a month after the class and didn't do as well as I'd like to have. I felt like I had an off day and definitely could've prepared better considering I'd been pretty busy at work. I signed up to take the test again in another month and emailed my teacher for a few more tips along the way. He really advised me through the whole process. On attempt 2, I did 50 points better than the first time and 10 points better than my best practice test. All in all I was very happy with my 730 and glad I didn't have to study any more. so yeah, I thought the course was worth it.

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I highly recommend Manhattan GMAT, and it helped me get to my target score. The professor was awesome, and it's certainly the best product out there.

A few areas I think it could improve:

1) Advanced courses - The one frustrating thing about the course is that you are with people at all different levels of quant and verbal proficiency. Therefore, even if you are ready to move on, the instructor would be stuck explaining concepts for a long time to someone else. It would be great if they added advanced courses (perhaps requiring 650 or so on a CAT to sign-up), that went at a faster pace and spent more time on 700+ questions.

2) Area of Focus. For whatever reason, I was naturally very good at Verbal, and wanted to focus on Math. The classes in general seemed to be tilted slightly towards Verbal. It would've been cool if I could've had a class that tilted a little more towards Math. I feel like, for the upper level math questions, I had to learn a lot of the tricks on my own through their advanced quant guide.

Overall the course was great though. I got a 680 when I took it 4 years ago, so I'm pretty happy with a 70-point jump (especially since my math skills had degraded since then). I guess it's really hard to tell how much the course helped on its merits, versus how much it just forced me to study a lot - but who cares, I got the score I wanted, and I probably would've studied less if not forced to do HW and Classes.

Definitely recommend taking Eric Caballero. He is really funny, smart, and explains concepts very well.

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I decided to sign up for MGMAT because I wanted to score in the 700+ range. Studying on my own was not yeilding the results I wanted, because I noticed that I was getting the same types of problems incorrect, without being able to truly analyze my weaknesses and create a systematic approach to improve. I was still able to recollect my basic quantitative and verbal skills, but MGMAT instruction and cirriculmn helped me improve my test taking strategy and timing for each problem. The MGMAT curriculum accurately categorizes the types of of quantitative problems into several topics, and by studying thoroughly each topic through the GMAT books, and the syllabus recommended problems, I was able to recognize the types of quant. problems immediately during the exam. This allowed me to quickly devise a strategy thus saving time spent on setting up the solution approach for each problem. The in class instruction was especially helpful for the more difficult problems because our instructor was able to extrapolate a simpler problem into a 700+ problem and explain the similarities and differences. This helped me understand how more challenging problems are phrased, and how to translate these problems into math. One particular example is for combinations/permutations & probability. I was never able to fundamentally grasp this topic until our MGMAT instructor gave us a hands - on example during class. After that, any such problem was easy!

I highly recommend MGMAT to those who are serious about their GMAT scores. There is a lot of homework during the course, and additional study time required prior to the exam, but I saw the results and was able to monitor how my score increased with each subsequent practice exam.

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