GMAT Advanced Quant: 250+ Practice Problems & Bonus Online Resources (Manhattan Prep GMAT Strategy Guides) 2nd Edition

I was unsure whether or not to buy this book because 99% of the reviews were from the Amazon "Vine" program and they are all basically fake five star reviews where you can tell the person hasn't ever looked at the book before reviewing it. However, I'm really glad I bought it and think those reviews do a huge disservice to the book because it has actually been really helpful. So here is an actual verified purchase review. One note: you should already be at 45+ in quant before you use this book or it won't be helpful.The content itself is good at pushing you to the next level of "thinking" and make you better on your feet in completing tough problems in under 2 minutes. They do cover some new ground which I was really surprised wasn't covered in the main 5 Manhattan Prep guides or even in the in-classroom course I took. For example, my weakest area was inequalities and absolute values in data sufficiency and the strategies in Chapter 4 on approaching those (e.g. creating multiple threads of "If |a|<0, then...." or "If |a|>0, then...") changed it so I actually look forward to these problems now. There aren't necessarily many new areas that are covered but the book helps you rethink what problems are really asking. For example, it shifts your understanding of remainder problems as pattern recognition problems or various inequalities as positives/negatives. I also feel a lot more comfortable using Smart Numbers, Testing Cases, and Working Backwards strategies. These are taught in the other guides but I always felt like they weren't really necessary because you're never forced to use them on really tough problems where other methods are impractical. However, I do feel like the guessing strategies aren't really that helpful and can be skimmed.The best part of the book is the 700-800 range only practice problems at the end of each chapter and 150 more in the back across all topics. They're all as tough as the 700-800 level problems that show up on the Manhattan CATs and great at preparing you. I recommend running a 20 minute timer on each of the 10 problem sets in the back of the book to do the problems under real time constraints and spending more time on reviewing the problems afterwards.Overall, I would say I'm very happy with my progress thanks to this book. I'm still preparing for the GMAT but this book has definitely lifted me beyond my score plateau and I feel a lot more comfortable when taking a practice CAT now and to eventually getting to my target score.

I'll preface this by saying that unlike some of the reviewers, I'm not a GMAT expert. I spent about 3 months studying for the GMAT, all through independent study. I would describe myself as having been a very good math student in high school and early college, but I'm not a real "math person," and quant doesn't come naturally to me.I started studying with the basic Kaplan book, the Official Guide quant book, and some online resources (Platinum GMAT, etc.) After about 2 and a half months of studying, I was doing okay, but quant still scared me. I saw quant problems in three categories: Problems I knew how to do, problems I almost knew how to do, and problems that were terrifying. Being relatively math-literate, I found that most problems fell into the first two categories, but I was still getting tripped up on that third category.Like one reviewer said, yes, this book is way harder than the actual GMAT, and if you're only concerned about learning to solve consistently the 95% of questions that aren't terrifying, this book is not for you. What I will say is that two weeks using this book took me from feeling scared about the GMAT to feeling like I could probably handle anything it threw at me, because I had already looked into the depths of the worst problems, and I had learned how to solve them.Using mostly this book, I went from approximately a 61st - 68th percentile in quant (Kaplan practice tests) to a 78th percentile (48) on the real thing. I probably could have scored better if I'd paced myself differently--amazingly, after failing to finish the last question on every practice test, I ended up having 8 minutes to spare on test day! While it wasn't a perfect quant score, it was enough to get me to a 770 overall (yes, I'm a verbal person).I don't know how much of my final score I can credit to this book, but I can definitely credit a good chunk of my test day confidence to it, and that mattered a lot to me. I recommend this book to anyone who's worrying about THOSE problems and wants to know how anyone actually solves them.