Barron's How to Prepare for the GMAT

OK, some of the sucky things about this book aren't the Barron's folks' fault. They're not the ones perpetuating the fiction that MBA graduates should know how to calculate the area of a trapezoid, nor are they the ones who decided that a standardized test was a good place to pick a side in the Perscriptivist/Descriptivist language wars. They're not even the ones who decided that the GRE wasn't good enough for MBA programs, that instead we needed a test that's basically the same thing except for a new class of trick questions. These things are the fault of the Graduate Management Admissions Council, and I'm pretty comfortable in guessing that the GMAT merits a Harsh Toke all its own.

So, yeah, the GMAT sucks, and that suckiness taints everything it touches. Even outside of that, though, the Barron's prep book is a stinky piece of crap. For one thing, it's full of typos. Not just misspellings and punctuation mistakes-although there are plenty of them. In several cases, clearly wrong answers will be marked on the practice tests or the explanations for answers will refer to a set of answers different from the ones listed. The suggestions for how to approach math questions are often very strange-it seems to be the official position of Barron's that no one in their right mind would use decimals when we have fractions available. In one question, they warn that a graph is not to scale and then have the answer hinge on a 1% difference in sizes represented by the graph.

Big chunks of the GMAT involve questions that are at least partially subjective, and this book struggles horribly with them. Their essay-prep section includes a couple of pages of suggestions aimed at 5th graders, followed by a suggestion that you write an essay and then figure out how you feel about it. Their critical reasoning and reading comprehension sections are arbitrary and baffling; they warn you not to extrapolate from the information provided on one question, but then tell you that the answer to the next is easily available if you just extrapolate a little.

This book has caused me much misery. I'm pretty good with standardized tests, so I'm not too worried about the GMAT itself; but man, studying for it sure sucked. Once the test is safely taken and my score is duly registered and all, I have every intention of taking Barron's How to Prepare for the GMAT up to Lake Superior and setting the motherfucker on fire.
--Keith Pille

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