Review: GMAT Official Guide 2016 Edition

ONLINE QUESTION BANK (POWERED BY ATARI)

It took me a while to find the online question bank. I even googled “Official Guide 2016 Online Question Bank”: Crickets. I’ve had issues using pretty much every piece of software from GMAC whether it was question pack 1 mysteriously de-activating itself or the Exam Pack losing results. Alas, flipping to the back of the Official Guide 2016, I spotted a plastic pouch with my access number along with the online question bank website: GMAT.Wiley.com. I put in the code, created an account, and voila I was transported back to 1985. This question bank really feels like it was done on the cheap.

GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE GMAT ONLINE QUESTION BANK:

1. You can set up a practice choosing difficulty (easy, medium, or hard) and any mixture of question types.
2. You can save your sessions so that you can review a session at a later date.
3. You can work in front of a computer screen as you will on the real exam.

NOT SO GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE ONLINE QUESTION BANK:

1. Although you can set up little practice sets, you can’t mix and match difficulty levels. So everything must be either easy, medium, or hard. You can’t do easy sentence correction mixed with hard critical reasoning.
2. The practice sets can’t be broken down by content. So you can’t access just geometry or statistics questions.
3. You only have access to the bank for 1 year and can’t access it offline. Yep. Absolutely ridiculous.

I assume that GMAC already has the questions tagged by type so it is tough to understand why the question bank can’t sort by content. Even just a few broad categories per questions type would be helpful. Not being able to mix up the difficulty levels seems like something that someone at GMAC just forgot to do considering that you can do this in the Question Pack 1 software from several years ago. I really can’t explain this omission otherwise. The limitation to one year of access seems to be something related to selling more books. So a used book would potentially be worth less than a new one because it wouldn’t come with the question bank.

HOW TO USE THE GMAT OFFICIAL GUIDE

For the GMAT Novice: Just beginning your preparation? You might start with the Verbal Review and the Quant review. These books are a notch easier than the GMAT Official Guide and will help you build up your fundamentals. After working through the first sixty or so questions in the reviews, go back to the beginning of the OG 2016 and work up to question fifty or so. Then go back to the reviews and do another sixty. Wash, rinse, repeat. This is a bit of a shotgun approach but is easy to organize on your own.

My preferred approach is to assign targeted sets. So spend several study session on the rate questions. Several sessions on exponents. Several sessions on statistics. And so on! You can still follow the same pattern of doing the work from the reviews first because the sets from those books will generally be easier.

For the GMAT initiated: If you’ve been around the block you could still benefit from targeted sets as detailed above. Even the easier questions from the Quant review when done as a part of a targeted set can really help open up a topic. Another way is to solve from back to front. Why? Because the tougher stuff is in the back. So considering that most people have limited time, and that you’ve most likely tackled the fundamentals, it makes sense to get through the more challenging items first.

Here are some further strategies for when and how to take a GMAT practice test and how to integrate the question pack 1 into your studying.

THE BOTTOM LINE

I’ve spent a good deal of this review taking shots at GMAC. And in my mind these criticisms are well deserved and really are just holding up these GMAC products to the standard of the GMAT itself. Does this mean that the new GMAT Official Guide is a dud? Nope. It is still the best single resource for official GMAT practice questions and an improvement over the last relevant version, Official Guide 13th Edition. If you are somewhere near the beginning of your work or if you haven’t bought any of the guides then buy this one. It is the best option out there. Better yet – grab the bundle of the GMAT Official Guide, Verbal Review, and Quant Review as you get a slight discount.

Here are some Official GMAT resources that you might also want to have:

1. Question Pack 1. 404 official GMAT Questions integrated into the GMAT Prep Software. This is an excellent set of questions and a steal at $29.99.
2. Exam Pack 1. The two newest GMAT practice tests. Fantastic practice for the end of your preparation.

OG 2016, QP1, and the Exam Pack are vital. If you want to cover your bases go ahead and pick up these last four as well.

1. The Official Guide for Quant Review. Slightly easier than the GMAT Official Guide but a worthwhile “skill builder” book.
2. The Official Guide for Verbal Review. On par with the Quant review in difficulty and utility.
3. GMAT Focus Quizzes. Computer adaptive Quant quizzes made up of official GMAT questions. There is a bit of groaning about these as they are expensive and have a bit of overlap with other resources. I still really like them for the last week of preparation.
4. The GMAT Paper Tests The GMAT used to be a pen and paper test. 9 of these old tests are available for purchase. The Quant is on the easy side but the verbal is solid practice.

For those who are interested in the raw data here is a complete breakdown of all of the new content from GMAT Official Guide 2016.

Andrew Geller is a GMAT expert who scored an impressive 770 on the exam. He’s been teaching since 2002 and throughout the past decade has worked for various big and small test prep companies helping people succeed on the GMAT, LSAT, SAT, ACT, and GRE. Throughout his career he has successfully taught people from many different backgrounds, countries, and starting scores. He leads Atlantic GMAT, a company which he founded to provide a creative and nuanced approach to GMAT preparation especially for students who have struggled to achieve their GMAT goals through big box test prep. He also entertains questions from P&Q readers here.