GMAC has publicly released the long awaited 12th Edition of the Official Guide for GMAT Review! The beloved big orange 11th Edition is being replaced by the same-size maroon 12th Edition.

Here at Manhattan GMAT, we heartily recommend all GMAC materials for students. Indeed, students receive all of the Official Guides when they sign up for any course. So the relevant question for most students is really, “If I already own the 11th Edition, should I run out (or go online) and get a new copy of the 12th Edition?”

And the answer is a decided “Yes, with reservations.”

First of all, if you own the 11th Edition, you already own 67% of the 12th Edition. Of the 907 problems, 607 are repeated from the 11th Edition. Indeed, the entire Diagnostic Text is identical. So you’re looking at 300 new problems.

Second, it is not the case that these 300 new problems break any substantial new ground in terms of question formats or tested material. They don’t. Often, they actually are substituted in place of VERY similar problems in the 11th edition that tested the exact same concepts.

Third, you might even have seen some of these 300 problems before, as some of them were already public via GMAC’s GMAT Focus tests.

All of that said, we always advocate that there’s nothing like the real thing. So if you don’t own the 11th edition, we’d say without hesitation that you should order the 12th edition ASAP (Note: All GMAC materials can be applied for book credit for any MGMAT course). The 12th edition does have a body of new data sufficiency questions (as DS questions are included in a higher proportion than was the case in the 11th). And even if you do own the 11th edition, 300 real GMAT problems for $36.95 (or less) is a pretty outstanding value.

For those of you of a statistical bent, we have posted a VERY thorough analysis of the differences between the 11th and 12th Editions here, right down to the granular problem level. We are very particular about our GMAT prep materials here at MGMAT. 🙂

Here at Manhattan GMAT, we’ve had a long and involved history with flash cards, or at least the idea of them.

On one hand, many students seemed to enjoy and benefit from practicing with flash cards. Indeed several of our Instructors have recommended using flash cards to their tutoring students for years.

However, the same Instructors recommended that the student construct his/her own flash cards, in order to facilitate both learning and prioritization. There was a concern that providing our own flash cards might channel students down the wrong paths, toward memorization as opposed to learning problem-solving techniques. Also, students would naturally think that whatever was on the flash cards was what they should know – we feared that providing flash cards might even wind up wasting students’ time on topics that weren’t useful for the individual.

So we decided to be both more and less ambitious with our brand new GMAT Flash Cards, which are now available for free. These Flash Cards are intended to give each student a tool to keep his/her GMAT ‘muscles’ sharp. They also can be very useful to give a student at the beginning of his or her studies a broad sense of some of the topics that the GMAT will test. Last, we did our best to make the Flash Cards less about rote memorization, and more about thinking and applying certain principles. The problems are generally not calculation-intensive; our goal was to make each card pass “the Subway Test” – a student should be able to complete the Flash Card while just looking at the card on the subway, without pen and paper.

The MGMAT Flash Cards are NOT exhaustive in terms of topics. Indeed, there aren’t even any Flash Cards for Critical Reasoning or Reading Comprehension, as those content areas don’t readily lend themselves to the format. Please do regard the MGMAT Flash Cards as a potentially useful supplementary or introductory tool, but not as a replacement for real studying! And if you find them helpful, you should seriously consider making your own flash cards consisting of problems you didn’t get right the 1st time or concepts you struggle with. It may be labor-intensive, but that’s the kind of individual work that’s virtually guaranteed to pay off.

Happy studying!