Update 11/19/2010. All the codes for Premium access to BTG Practice questions have been claimed already.
Last week I received invitation from the Beat The GMAT (BTG) founder, Eric, to review the new Beat the GMAT Practice Questions. Admittedly, GMAT is far from being on my priorities list with all the classes I am taking now in my second Fall Module of part-time MBA at George Washington University. However I was curious to check this out and to give some feedback to the creators of the BTG to help improve the quality of their offering to all the MBA aspirants.
The excruciating memories flooded me the moment I launched the quantitative section after logging into my reviewer’s account. Ah, all those sleepless nights I was toiling over the GMAT preparation just two years ago 
. It took me to go through just a handfull of the math practice questions to realize that there was a good reason for me to spend almost six months of my life preparing for the GMAT test. I courageously mastered through about a dozen questions on each of the sections: verbal and math and realized that it was enough.
Questions did seem to resemble the ones from the GMAT OG. I really liked the fact that the explanations of the answers were both in text and video format. I watched a few video explanations and they were quite clear and to the point. If you don’t have time to go through the video and want to keep your own pace of practicing, then the text explanation comes handy.
Another feature of the BTG GMAT Practice Questions I liked a lot was the benchmarking against other people who practice the questions. You can see not only your own average percent of correct answers and average time per question in each of the sections and sub-sections, such as Data Sufficiency and Problem Solving for math or Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension for verbal, but also the cumulative averages of all other users in the same categories. I think it helps to see other people’s averages in order to identify where your stand in terms of correctness and answering speed.
The team at BTG also took an effort to make the Practice Questions adaptive in order to make the experience as close to the actual GMAT as possible. I think this is really great.
There are a total of about 700 questions available for practice, 300+ verbal and 400+ math. The access to this new GMAT Practice Questions comes with the price tag – $99 for one year access. This will give anyone plenty of time and practice. However if you sign up for this service before November 15, 2010 you can get a real bargain – all the features of Premium account for half price. Plus, BTG offers 3 iPads to be rafted among all people who sign up for either Premium paid or Basic free account before November 15. All this comes with 30 days money back guarantee.
As for me, my half-assed attempt on the GMAT Practice Questions resulted, quite predictably, in about 50% correct answers on both verbal and math sections. OK, I will try to compensate for that by getting a higher grade in my actual MBA classes. If that fails, I can also find consolation in my grade for final exam in Financial Markets ;-)
If your read this far in the post I have another good news for you. Beat the GMAT has kindly offered a few free Premium accounts to the readers of this blog. So if you are still preparing for your GMAT test, shoot me an email ASAP (webmaster at parttimembadegree.com) and the first four people will receive FREE Premium access to the Practice Questions. I also would like to publish name (or at least nickname), country, city, and target MBA programs of those people who get this Premium access to BTG Practice Questions through my blog, with compliments from Beat the GMAT.
