Ace the GMAT

Rating:
Summary: Good content, poor publishing standards...
Review: After reviewing the big-name GMAT review books provided by ETS, Kaplan and Princeton Review, I knew I needed a GMAT skills book that would identify key areas of weakness and help solidify and improve those areas. A book that would cleanly break out the various types of GMAT questions I was having difficulties with and then provide tips and expertise to improve the skills needed to answer those questions properly. While Ace the GMAT has plenty of helpful and practical tips, the overall production quality of the publication seriously detracts from the information provided.

Given the book is in its first edition, the book has a substantial number of errors: typos, mismatched answer keys, missing questions in the answer key and mislabelled diagrams. In addition to the obvious errors, there are publishing and layout concerns. Compressed text and headers making it difficult to identify different sections of the chapter. Quizzes with answer choices printed across two pages. Questions that are labelled with titles rather than numbers making it tricky to use the answer key. Answers that don't highlight the correct answer choice. All of these errors while minor and not too frequent, provide for a frustrating study experience. An experience most people studying for the GMAT would prefer to do without.

Given that the author's home is in Hong Kong and the publisher is located in Thailand, I may just be complaining about different publishing styles and standards. But overall, it looks as if the book was rushed to publication with an eye on minimizing expenses and a definite lack of quality assurance. I did not even like the paper the book is published on, it has a bit of an odd texture with an oily smell.

Outside of those complaints, I would have to say the information provided within the book is of great value. Outlining tips, equations and strategies for nasty GMAT questions. I have yet to take the GMAT exam but feel the book has improved my odds. To learn from this book, you must be willing to overlook its blemishes and have faith that the errors within the publication are just due to editorial and publishing issues rather than the knowledge of the author. If you have the patience to wade through these problems, I think you'll find Ace the GMAT to be a valuable tool to your GMAT studies and preparation. But in the end, I can't separate the quality of the information provided from the quality of the publication itself, hence the three stars...

Note: You can email the publisher for corrections and I did not try out the included CD but it appears to have some bugs.



Rating:
Summary: Extremely well-organized with good examples
Review: Brandon Royal's text proves that the GMAT is a completely doable exam with the right preparation. His book breaks down the GMAT into sections that address categories and types of problems that consistently dominate the exam. This book was an invaluable tool for me throughout my prep time for the GMAT. It's the one book you should have as you prepare to take the GMAT.

Rating:
Summary: Well worth the investment.
Review: Excellent skills-building tool that closed the gap in my preparation for the GMAT, which other prep books weren't doing. The author does a fabulous job of providing the lowdown on the question types that recur on the test and the approaches that actually work, and presenting them in a way that's easy for time-poor test takers to digest. Indispensable in helping this test taker hit the 95th percentile. Absolutely worth the investment.

Rating:
Summary: don't make the same mistake i did
Review: I bought this book and within the first fifteen minutes had realized that I had made a mistake. Not that the content is horrible, but within the first chapter there were so many mispellings, miswritten formulas, questions with the wrong answer choices (meaning that for a question the answer key had the answer as option E whereas the actual question only had options A-D) that I got frustrated. I decided to return the book and not waste any more time trying to find the answer to a question that had no right answer or studying a formula that was wrong. Do not waste your money or time.

If the book was edited more carefully it might be worth buying but not in its current condition.

Rating:
Summary: Very Helpful Tips
Review: I found 'Ace the GMAT' to be, by far, the most helpful book of all of the GMAT preparation books I used. While the Kaplan GMAT book and the official GMAT guide published by ETS are both invaluable, I nevertheless found the tips and strategies provided by the 'Ace the GMAT' book to be the most comprehensive, concrete and ultimately helpful. The strategies included to tackle the math section were particularly good, especially the chapter regarding questions on probability. Overall, I do not think that anyone's GMAT prep-book arsenal is complete without this book.

Rating:
Summary: The GMAT Miracle
Review: I found this book to be excellent for sorting problems into groups and learning what common principles are behind related problems. The book has a cool list of ¡°tips¡± imbedded in the solutions section which helped me grasp the common principles behind problem groupings. Even as a liberal arts major and former investment banker, I found a good number of these math and verbal tips simple but not necessarily obvious and enjoyed having them spelled out for me. Examples: Tip #48: ¡°Two rectangular solids my have identical surface areas but different volumes (and vice versa)¡± and Tip #92: ¡°If A is thought to be causing B, the idea that B is causing A is called reverse causation and casts serious doubt on the notion that A is really causing B.¡± The book has a wonderful review of analytical writing and a nice short grammar review in the appendix. This book will teach you how to do problems, and I found it a great complement to the GMAT Official Guide, which has gobs of practice problems but doesn¡¯t deal with how problems work conceptually. In summary, although I was a bit skeptical at first, I thought this book was well deserving of its claim to be ¡°the #1 skill-building GMAT book.¡±

Rating:
Summary: Effective GMAT preparation
Review: I think this book is invaluable for someone who's preparing the GMAT. It focus on topics that students need to master to get a reasonably high score in GMAT. This approach is quite differenty from other text where they simply list a series of problems for students to work on. I feel this approach is much more effective in helping students to answer the more difficult questions in GMAT.


Rating:
Summary: too many editing mistakes
Review: There are so many errors in the book that unless you know what you're doing, it's hard to get through it. To the publisher's credit, they did include a corrections list if you request it via email. But the problem is still not fixed because you'll be immersed in your studying, and it's difficult to know when to divert your attention to the corrections list until it's too late...

Rating:
Summary: It is just fine
Review: This book is just fine! It isn't the greatest GMAT book out there but it is a helpful study tool, and could be the book that helps some people reach their goal.

My comments will now be directed towards HAMMOND who reviewed this book on the 12th of November and cited a certain problem from the book. Hammond, sir, you are a complete moron and should stay far, far away from business school. Adrian in the problem IS FEMALE,not male, and the the pronoun "she" is refering to Adrian, not to the other woman writing a term paper. So when the problem states that Adrian finished writing 6 hours after SHE started, it is refering to Adrian HERSELF. Because you cannot determine Adrian's (A WOMAN) starting time, neither statements provide enough information to correctly answer the question, thus the answer is, in fact, E. You should be thrilled with a 500 on your GMAT and enjoy your experience at the University of Phoenix executive MBA program.

Again, this book is fine, and provides plenty of good problems to work through.

Rating:
Summary: It defies common knowledge and any logical sense
Review: This book is so bad that it is not even worth this review that I am writing. I want customers to know that by buying this book, I have made such a mistake that I would just throw it away, because If I were to try to return it it wouldn't be worth the trip.
I have seen books that would actually lower your score if you used them because they are based on the old paper and pencil GMAT format instead of the CAT format. For example, the REA Testbuster's GMAT kit includes verbal vocabulary games, despite the fact that vocabulary is not tested on the GMAT as it is on the GRE or the SAT. This book, however, is even worse than those: you cannot possibly lower your score by studying from this book, because you will figure out immediately that something is wrong and you will have enough sense to throw it away.
The CD asked the same questions during the practice exam, which were easy enough the first time around. Look at this example from the CD and be the judge yourself:
Sylvia and Adrian are each typing a term paper. Who finishes first?
I. Sylvia begins typing at 10 am and finishes at 6pm
II. Adrian finishes typing 6 hours after she starts
The CD has a lenghty explanation of why the answer is E, even though you can figure out that Adrian finished at 4pm, which means that he finished first. The correct answer is thus C (both statements together are useful). I suppose if you were drunk when you were coming up with the questions, you could easily come up with many similar mistakes.
The book and CD claim that they prepare you for the GMAT, but the CD seems to prepare you for elementary school. It seems to me that the publisher is running a publishing business out of the basement of an insane asylum.