Kaplan GMAT 2005 with CD-ROM (Kaplan Gmat)

Rating:
Summary: Hit and miss
Review: The strategies offered in this book are pretty sound and far better than Princeton's Reviews suggestions to try to work the system rather than trying to figure out the answer. 4/5 on that account.

The sample questions are good practice, but their style differs too much from the style of questions in the official GMAT guide (which contains actual GMAT questions used in the past). This makes the actual exam questions seem quite different when you read them so pick up the official GMAT guide to get a true feel of the quesitons. It seems like the writers of these quesitons tried to get really creative at times and some critical reasoning questions end up resembling a math problem more than a verbal one. 4/5 for the questions themselves.

The answers to the questions tended stay barely above the bare minimum. I found this to be most annoying with their sentence correction answers. These answers were often incomplete and made vague references to incorrect idioms without givingt he correct form. On the bright side, the math portion seemed to be on the mark most of the time. 2/5 due to the sentence correction travesty.

CD-ROM. This has to be one of the LEAST professional examples of software ever. The target audience is working professionals that are trying to get into a good business school. Based on that you'd expect nice, streamlined software with a more mature user in mind. Kaplan ends up sucker-punching you with a nightmareish cartoon menu system that wastes time showing animations and playing annoying sounds. If the childish approach to presentation was the only problem with the software, I could forgive them but it was only the tip o fhte iceberg. The navigation is split between buttons in the middle of the screen and the menu bar that would randomly deactivate itself and force you to click another button on the screen prior to using the menu. Navigating the answers to exams you've already taken is horrid at best. Sadly, the situation worsens once you try to take the exams. Rather than loading the questions onto your harddrive, it reads it from the CD-ROM as you take the exam. That may not sound like a problem until you consider the fact that many computers are configured, as an energy-saving method, to spin the disc only when needed. This means you can have a very noticeable delay in time between questions. That wouldn't be so bad if it didn't waste test taking time. And like all badly written software, it locked up my computer. Not surprisingly, I give the software a 0/5.

The practice exams themselves gave me mixed feelings. Their difficulty made them excellent exams to practice. However, some of the questions provide plenty of evidence Kaplan didn't bother proof-reading many of them. For example, one question asks about a specific quote in line 12 of the passage. You can imagine how annoyed I was to find the quote was at line 14 and worded completely differently from the question. My favorite example of lack of proofreading was the question containing the word, "nallulytu" or something to that effect. That was supposed to read: "naturally." Still, the point of the exams is for practice, so despite the lack of quality control I give the exams a 4/5.