If you are planning on taking GMAT in Chicago, I would highly recommend the test center on Wacker Drive.

I took my GMAT on Jan 14th 2011 and got 690. Ladies at a testing center were very nice and helpful. Also testing center itself is nice and clean. I am not sure if every center provides those, but the center on Wacker had earplug headphones. I never worked on my test with those, but on the test day they turned out to be extremely helpful.

I really think that this center deserves five stars, and would definitely recommend.

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I started my preparations for GMAT in September '11 and signed up for the four month course (kudos to GMAT Club for $100 off). I took my first test and... I was very disappointed :p. I got 500 points. I wanted to apply for Kellogg's part-time MBA program. With that score it would definitely not be possible. I was slightly discouraged, and tried to get myself into more positive thinking reading success stories of 200 point improvements on GMAT club forum (again kudos to GMAT club members). Four months after Knewton's prep I took my first official GMAT. I got 690 points (quant 44 verbal 40)!!! :D I’m pretty sure that I could still improve even more with some extra prep on my verbal (English is my second language). Nevertheless, let's leave that for next time if won't get in where I want to.

Knewton's prep is divided conveniently into 13 sections - each with verbal and quant component. Every session contains initial assessment (about 25 questions), pre-recorded class (70min on average), homework, and reassessment test. In addition, Knewton provides you with a total of 6 full length GMAT mock exams (including your initial assessment test), extra homeworks, extra pre-recorded concept focused videos, extra questions, and extra hard (at least for me) midterm and final challenge tests. Believe me, you will have more than enough material to study.

All questions are timed. After submitting your answers you can check how long it took you to solve each one of the questions. In addition, Knewton gives you a comprehensive list of concepts with detailed explanations. As you go through each session your list of concepts to review fills up. The most amazing part about Knewton's prep is that the questions are so similar to the questions you will come across during the actual test. The part that I appreciated a lot is that Knewton wasn't trying to push on me to learn many strategies that could help me to guess the answer. Instead, Knewton showed me how each question could be solved using algebra, and what basic techniques I could use to speed up my process. I find this method much better and more convincing than Kaplan's or Princeton's GMAT guestimation (yeah, I tried both prep books before starting my Knewton classes). I also went though Manhattan books (which I really liked) out of curiosity, and I have to say that I feel like Knewton online course is a mixture of what's best in all prep materials that I've seen.

There are few things that I thought could be improved on:
- Verbal sections - I have no idea how they could make studying to those sections easier or more effective. Nevertheless, while Knewton gave me plenty of prep questions I still haven’t improved much on my verbal score. Maybe if they focused on more tricky questions... I have no idea. Maybe even more questions group in the types of questions like in math? So for instance a whole section on inference? No idea... I leave that to Knewton geeks ;].
- Flagging questions - unfortunately Knewton doesn't give you that option. You know whether you did the questions right or wrong after the fact, but you can't flag them as you go, or even after the fact for future reference. I would really like that feature to be added.
- Concept list updates - So here's the deal. Once you solve any of the questions, Knewton gives you a list of concepts that were tested in each question. Then, once you go to each of concept, questions with that given concept show on the side of the concept as a reference. I would like Knewton to divide this column into correctly and incorrectly answered. It's not a very important feature, but it would be cool to have it.
- Question redo - currently you can redo only homework and extra quiz questions. It would be really awesome if you could redo the tests and reassessments as well.

I hope that all of you considering Knewton for your GMAT prep will find this review helpful. Oh, and by the way, I actually completed my 13 sessions in 3 months. I used the last month to review concepts and questions I did wrong throughout. After I was done with Knewton, I moved on to do questions from OG. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t find many questions to be so challenging anymore :D

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