So what is the Official Guide?

The Official Guide (or as we call it, the OG) is a GMAT preparation book put out by the GMAC – the organization in charge of administering the exam. The fact that it’s written by the GMAC is important, since this is what gives the OG what other prep books don’t offer: real questions from GMAT exams, which other prep companies can’t use for copyright reasons. These questions themselves aren’t going to appear on your exam; they have been ‘retired’, but they are obviously the closest thing out there to the questions that will.

In addition to the Official Guide, which has questions from all sections of the exam (Integrated Reasoning included), the GMAC puts out an Official Guide Verbal Review and Quantitative Review, which focus on one section only and provide 300 additional questions to the ones appearing in the basic OG. The GMAC puts out a new edition of each of these guides each year; the 2018 Official Guide has 900 questions, out of which 130 are new and do not appear in previous versions. The Verbal and Quant versions each have 45 new questions.

How to prepare for the GMAT with the Official Guide

The OG, then, is a great tool, but tools are only useful if we know how to use them. How, then, to best use the OG? The idea is this: when approaching a new question, read the question stem and pause before going over the answers or trying to solve it. Ask yourself: how should I solve this question? In examPAL terms, what PAL should I use?

This means obviously checking in the OG whether the solution was right or wrong, but this is only the beginning:

For correct answers, we must stop and think whether our chosen answer strategy was the most efficient available.

For mistaken ones, we must ask ourselves what caused the mistake and how to do better next time.

Next, we’ll use the OG to seek out similar questions and make sure we learned from our mistake. There’s no need to rush this process; rather, we should take our time to comprehensively research and review.  It’s not about the quantity of questions we solve, but about the quality of what we learn from solving those questions .

The Official Guide is not enough

Alright then, just buy the newest OG and it’s off to the races, right? Well, wrong.

While the OG is a valuable tool that we recommend using in your studies, we very much do not recommend using this book alone. The reason is that, well, it’s a book. And while we love books in everyday life, in terms of GMAT prep, they have some very basic disadvantages.

Most importantly, the GMAT is adaptive, which books will never be. While the test dynamically feeds you questions of varying degrees of difficulty, zeroing in on your precise proficiency level, books are a monotonous slog through predetermined questions, most of whose difficulty level is completely irrelevant to you.

Books also provide us with one-size-fits-all explanations, whereas (as examPAL users know well) most questions have a few solutions, and efficient studying entails learning the one that’s right for you. Books can of course not give us any feedback either: the crucial task of reviewing our question-solving, and arriving at conclusions regarding the topics and tools our study must focus on going forward is left to us alone, with no tips or guidance.

Lastly, studying with a book leaves us completely unfamiliar with the exam’s computer interface, which is no good either; we want as few surprises as possible on test day.

All of this being said, the OG still has the basic advantage discussed earlier: it is the only source out there, book or otherwise, that provides us with real GMAT questions rather than mere approximations. For this reason, the OG does have value as a study tool, just not on its own.

Official Guide overview

So how should we best incorporate the OG into our studies? As stated above, we recommend not solving the questions in the book start to finish, but rather seeking out the questions that are relevant to you. For example, say you just solved the Circles section in the examPAL course but got a low Optimization score. Now is the time to seek out in the OG Circles questions of an appropriate level of difficulty.

In order to find the OG question you are looking for, here’s a guide to the OG questions, and which section in the examPAL course they correspond to:

Integers

Critical Reasoning

Fractions and percent

Interest

Reading Comprehension

Triangles

Powers and Roots

Ratio and Proportions

Sentence Correction

Quadrilaterals

Expressions and Equations

Rate and Work

Circles

Sets

Positive and negative numbers

Polygons

Counting Methods and Probability

Coordinate Geometry

Descriptive Statistics

Solids