The GMAT Official Guide is dumb, but it’s not because of its lessons, practice questions or practice tests. In fact it has nothing to do with its content, which is undoubtedly high quality. It’s because of the format.
Like all test prep books, the Official Guide is a stack of information. It can’t coach you through its material nor can it track your study progress or test performance. Instead its up to you figure out which parts you need to study, how best to divide your time between reading material and practicing questions, and how to assess your performance – tasks that can be as head splitting as the toughest GMAT question.
Study apps also contain a lot of information, but they can apply it in smart ways that make studying both simpler and more effective, which is exactly what Prep4GMAT’s new Smart Guide does. The Smart Guide is Prep4GMAT’s new lesson structure that will be a part of the new version of the app coming next month.
Prep4GMAT’s Smart Guide takes you through all the content you need to know on the GMAT and integrates study, practice and review into concise lessons.
Each lesson teaches an important verbal or quant topic by breaking the topic down into its essential concepts that are explained on flashcards. Following the flashcards, a few practice question sets allow you to apply what you’ve just learned on realistic GMAT questions. The question sets vary in difficulty to help you first learn and then master the topic.
After each question set, a debrief lets you review your answers and learn from your mistakes with expert answer explanations for each question. During this whole process, Prep4GMAT’s analytics keeps track your performance, showing you exactly how you’re improving and what areas are your weakest.
After every 10 lessons, the Smart Guide gives you a 20-question test to assess your comprehension of what you’ve learned and to help you practice answering questions under test like conditions.
The Smart Guide’s streamlined integration of study, practice and review helps you get right to learning and improving test concepts rather than sorting through and skimming over pages of text. Even if you have just 5 minutes to study, you can make tangible progress with the Smart Guide.
While the Smart Guide takes you from lesson to lesson, topic to topic, you still have the freedom to go directly to a specific topic you want to study. Selecting the Browse Topics tab allows you to go directly to a lesson of your choosing, so for instance if you’re learning how to identify CR assumptions in the Smart Guide but want instead to study geometry, you can go to Browse topics and then select the geometry lesson.
Perhaps you’re already a quant whiz and it’s just your verbal score holding you back. On the new Smart Guide you’ll also have the ability to filter the course for a quant or verbal emphasis. Selecting the verbal filter will remove all the quant lessons from the Smart Guide so you can focus on verbal lessons and not have to skip through all the quant lessons.
The best part? The Smart Guide and all of Prep4GMAT’s other features are available wherever you go, no wifi or heavy text book required. Just take out your smart phone or tablet and go.
Look for the new version of Prep4GMAT with the Smart Guide to be released next month!
Want to be one of the first people to get the new version of Prep4GMAT? Sign up here and we’ll send you an email as soon as the new version is ready.