Update: I have determined that GMATWhiz plagiarized RC text from multiple online sources! Read this for more: https://gmatclub.com/forum/plagarism-or-inspiration-387692.html

TL;DR: Limited material for quant, the worst possible material for verbal, slapped onto a user-antagonistic platform. Question bank consists of bad original questions and poor derivatives of official questions which leads to a misprediction of your strengths and weaknesses. I’ve wasted more money, time, and effort undoing the damage. Look elsewhere.


My background is in machine learning research, particularly in natural language processing/generation in English. Your mileage may vary. I will reproduce relevant portions of questions in my review, covered under fair use law.


GMATWhiz is a relatively new course prep provider, and it shows. The platform lacks the polish of other competitors – the user interface looks slick, but the user experience can’t be much worse. I shouldn’t have to pay to struggle with a buggy platform while trying to study for an important exam. With that in mind, let’s go through the good, bad, and ugly for verbal, quant, and the platform.


Verbal: I can’t find anything good to say about verbal. I started on the platform with a mock verbal score of 37 and it plummeted to a 34 and 32 after finishing the course. Can’t make this up even if I tried. The coursework for RC reuses the same few passages to the point of tedium, and there’s little learning that can be done when the passage has been over-analyzed. The coursework for CR in general just dumps a (non-exhaustive) list of definitions and synonyms on you, _surely_ you can figure out the rest yourself.


The GMATWhiz’s approach for SC is probably the worst that I’ve seen. They advocate a painfully drawn-out method to evaluate the meaning of a sentence, promising that with time and practice, the pain will be alleviated. I argue that an ineffective approach is just that, ineffective. Learning how to make an ineffective approach faster (and god know I’ve tried) doesn’t magically make it better. It wasn’t until I’ve consulted a tutor that I understood the full extent of the damage that their SC approach has done. I had to spend considerably more time, money (more than 5x their course fees) and effort to undo it. The questions provided aren’t much better either. There is a huge variance in quality and most questions are nothing like what you will encounter in the actual exam. This also leads to the completely undesirable (albeit interesting) misprediction of your strengths and weaknesses. The SC questions are so bad that I’ve caught typos in option A (which is supposed to be a verbatim copy of the underlined portion). There are questions with no appropriate answers according to official GMAT instructions. For example, reproduced verbatim, underlined portion in [ square brackets ]:


Q: [Tetrapods, the first four-legged land animals, are regarded as the first organisms that had fingers and toes which now, researchers can prove wrong] as they have found rudiments of fingers in the fins in fossil Panderichthys, a "transitional animal," between fish and tetrapod.


A) Tetrapods, the first four-legged land animals, are regarded as the first organisms that had fingers and toes which now, researchers can prove wrong.

B) Now researchers can prove wrong that Tetrapods which are the first four-legged land animals regarded as the first organisms that had fingers and toes.

C) Tetrapods, the first four-legged land animals, are regarded as the first organisms that had fingers and toes, a belief that now researchers can prove wrong. [Correct answer according to GMATWhiz]

D) As the first organisms that had fingers and toes, Tetrapods are regarded as the first four-legged land animals which now researchers can prove wrong,

E) Regarded as the first organisms that had fingers and toes, Tetrapods, the first four-legged land animals which now researchers can prove wrong to be a wrong belief


How on earth is “prove wrong. As they have found rudiments of fingers […]” correct in this scenario? Also, according to the platform, RC is my worst section by far whereas CR and SC is a toss-up. In reality, my ESR from my attempt shows that I got full marks on both CR and RC. If you’re a victim of their verbal course, seek professional help immediately.


If this isn’t enough to discourage you, read on.


Quant:
The good: - All relevant material is covered, some extra material too. - The instructor derives some of the commonly used magic values, which can be helpful if you forget them during the exam.


The bad: GMATWhiz advocates one way to do things. If you like having more than one tool in your belt, you’re out of luck. This is extremely bad for topics such as sets and inequalities, forcing me to supplement my learning with materials from other sources.


The ugly: The quality and variety of the questions are sorely lacking. Word problems often become a verbal exercise where I spend more time trying to figure out what the question is truly trying to say. There are questions in which students are “giving exam[s]” (To who? If you assume they give to the same entity, the answer you arrive at is different from if you assume that they gave it to each other); [some person] “bought 35 more ponies and horses” (35 more ponies and 35 more horses? 35 more (ponies + horses)?). Many questions are clones of each other with some numbers tweaked, an example on mixtures will be given later. This inflates their question count, and more likely than not, your accuracy which in turn leads to poor estimate of your actual capabilities.


The unforgivable: - The platform claims to have AI-powered technology, but it just serves you more questions in the areas that you’re weak in. It’s supposed to be helpful but the follow up questions are so similar to the ones that you’ve gotten wrong that reinforcement learning simply doesn’t take place. I wasn’t challenged to apply the concept; I was forced to regurgitate. For example, I got this question wrong:


There are two bottles of milk-water solutions with different concentrations of milk in them. The first bottle contains 6 litres and the second bottle contains 12 litres of milk-water solution. If equal amount of solution is taken from each bottle. The solution taken from the first bottle is added to the second bottle and the solution taken from the second is added to the first. If on doing so, the milk-water concentration becomes the same in both the bottles, then how many litres of solution was taken from each bottle?


and was immediately served with this question as a “concept booster”:


There are two solutions of water and spirit of different concentrations. Solution 1 is of 30L and solution 2 is of 10L. If same amount of solution is taken from each of the solutions and added to other solutions, the concentration of both the solutions becomes same. Find the amount taken from each solutions? It doesn’t take a genius to realize that these two questions are just simple value swaps. Also note the poor grammar and phrasing, it’s a recurring theme. Maybe you benefit from rote learning, but I certainly don’t. Most importantly, I don’t think GMAT rewards rote learning. - The platform artificially inflates its bank of questions by providing poor copies of official questions. The deleterious effects that these questions can have on your prep cannot be understated. I quote @IanSteward [https://gmatclub.com/forum/plagarism-or-inspiration-387692.html#p3003453] from our discussion about plagiarism (which I encourage you to read for insights from other esteemed members): " - for the test taker who will study official questions (which every test taker should do), it’s just a waste of that person’s time to study inferior prep company copies of those same questions; - test takers can get a false sense of security, if they fly through the OG because they’ve seen variations on the same questions in advance. But on test day, not one question will be a copy of something you’ve studied before, and the whole psychological experience of test day will feel completely different from the experience you had during your preparation; - when companies copy GMATPrep test questions, test takers can get vastly inflated scores on their diagnostic tests, and then, because test takers might then think they’re more prepared than they really are, they can make bad decisions about when to book a real test. The official diagnostic tests are the only reliable assessment tool test takers have, and any company that compromises their usefulness is doing test takers more harm than good."


An example of such a derivative question: OG CR question: Sparrow Airlines is planning to reduce its costs by cleaning its planes’ engines once a month, rather than the industry standard of every six months. With cleaner engines, Sparrow can postpone engine overhauls, which take planes out of service for up to 18 months. Furthermore, cleaning an engine reduces its fuel consumption by roughly 1.2 percent.


OG answer: B. the cost of monthly cleaning of an airplane’s engines is not significantly greater in the long run than is the cost of an engine overhaul.


GMATWhiz question: The Great Eastern Hotel is fully covered by wall to wall carpeting which the hotel normally pressure cleans twice a year. With the intention of reducing its costs, the hotel now plans to pressure clean the carpets every two months. With frequent cleaning, the hotel can delay the complete replacement of old carpets by new ones, a process which requires the hotel to close business for a week. Moreover, frequent pressure cleaning of carpets increases their durability and longevity.


GMATWhiz answer: Whether the long run costs of more frequent pressure cleanings is not significantly greater than the cost of buying new carpets?


While the degree to which the question has been disguised is open to debate, your time can undoubtedly be invested in OG questions for significantly more benefit.


The platform:
The good: GMATWhiz offers a Q&A section that allows you to see previous questions asked by other students as well as get feedback from the platform’s mentors. They usually get back to you within 1-3 working days.


The bad:
- The site misuses tabs and toggles: tabs are for navigation; toggles are for selection. These are not supposed to be interchangeable. This makes it really difficult to find what I needed on their platform as I had to fight the user interface tooth and nail to find what I need.


- The UI straight up doesn’t work on certain screens, for example, in the mock result screen, the menu button doesn’t work at all.


- The platform doesn’t allow deep linking, so if you’re keeping an error log (which you should) and want to link back to an exact question, you’re out of luck. Have fun navigating through ALL the questions to find that one you need.


- The time tracking feature drastically overestimates the time required for each activity. 30 hours as tracked by the platform barely translates to 10 hours real time for me. Good ego boost if you’re into that kind of thing.


- The platform offers you a short quiz (usually just one question per topic) and offers to personalize your course by removing videos covering topics that it has judged you to be proficient in, never mind that one question is not a good test of understanding. If you accept the offer, the videos are removed from your course, and you’ll have to go through multiple screens to find it again (which isn’t easy nor explained anywhere). They could have just marked the videos as skipped and kept them in your course for ease of access but then you won’t have to struggle that much.


- Question options have inconsistent formatting, some options are in a darker/lighter color compared to the rest, exposing the correct answer most of the time. More ego boosting if you benefit from positive reinforcement.


Conclusion: All in all, I’m thoroughly convinced that the GMATWhiz course provides no advantage over other course offerings and in fact has damaged my ability to score. Their subpar question bank cripples their simple algorithm and in turn crippled me. I got my score in spite of GMATWhiz, not because of it.

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