Eric Bahn, the founder of Beat the GMAT gave me free access to
New Beat the GMAT Practice questions and ask to write true review of them. So there you can read this review.
What is BTG Practice Questions?
This is service that provide opportunity to solve approximately 700 GMAT questions of all types. OG contains not more bigger number of questions. So for me product with name BTG PC resembles to OG. But due to it is Internet based, it provides more opportunity for users.
Good sides of BTG PC
+ You can customize practice in great degree. You can choose not only type of questions (Reading comprehension, Critical Reasoning , Sentence Corrections, Data Sufficiently etc.) as in OG but also more narrow topics. For example you can choose questions that test knowledge of idiom, test your ability to weaken argument, arithmetic questions etc. In addition you can choose level of difficulty of questions. If you choose adaptive mode, software will give you questions according your ability to answer correctely, as do that in real test.
+ There is in BTG PQ concise written and video explanation to every questions.
+ Software create detailed error log automatically, in that you can not only see number of questions in which you made a mistake, but also analyze in which type of questions you make a mistake more frequently. In next practice session due to opportunity to customize practice in great degree you can solve only the most challenged questions for you therefore preparation will be more efficient. In addition you can flag exact questions (for example the most difficult for you questions) and do only them, solve only questions in that you made a mistake, or only new ones etc. In sum level of customizations of practicing in BTG PC is very deep and this makes preparation efficient and interesting.
Drawbacks
There are few ones now. I would write about them If i noticed . Yesterday at the night i pointed several drawbacks in software but today i do not see them so i've delete their description from this post. And i do not konw now if they were fixed, or i was very slippy, during writing rewiev. Maybe main drawbacks is that BTG PC contains only 700 questions.
Conclusion
BTG practice questions is useful product for preparation to GMAT, for all test takers, especially for people who prepare for exam a lot of time and need a ''fresh questions'.
In addition I want to say that when I saw renewed version of BTG PC I was wondering because I did not see all drawbacks that were present in previous version. (
this is my review of previous version). This fact says that BTG team works a lot for improving this product.
Wishes
1. Create, please, additional version of interface of BTG PC in which all fonts colors and contrast are just the same as in real exam. In fact person's speed of reading strongly correlate with fonts. Two years ago when I administrated news site I did experiments, in which I recorded time of reading of long articles of all readers. And this experiments shows that the speed of reading the same article written with different fonts and coefficient of people who do not finished to read article are different. Because experiment recorded date of thousands readers, result was very precise.
If time of reading of article with font Century Schoolbook is 100%, the time of that with Time New Roman is 114%, Georgia – 104, Arial – 136, Vranda 129, Tahoma – 128, Century Gothic – 137.
In second, according to experiments the speed of reading sharply differed from width of column. Optimal width of column is ~5 words. In BTG Questions width of column in SC and CR are narrowed then that is real test so speed of reading of question is higher. So in lust stages of studying, solving questions that look like real will be good experience.
2. What me and another applicant want to get from service for preparing to GMAT? Maybe it is not a questions but exact plan of studying after accomplishing which person will definitively achieve required score.
So It would be excellent to implement “virtual teacher”, the fixture that can create personal plan of studying. In first before practicing every member will have a very detailed test after which system not only show to which type of questions one answered better and to which worse but give provide information how many hours he or she should spend and haw many questions or each type he or she should solve for achieving required result in each section.
Every time when person will attend site for studying not one will choose way for studying but virtual teacher. According to persons performance, remaining time for achieving required goal will change. In this situation students will save a lot of energy that they spend to creating study plan and use all time and energy definitely to preparation.
In my opinion to create such “virtual teacher” that would make study plans is possible, and it can do better study plans then real teachers. BTG PQ use a lot of people, and track of performance of everyone is recorded in archive. There are evidence in this archive how often every person studied, what time one spend to different types of questions, how frequent one took break in studying, etc, and how one improved performance. Detailed evaluation of this information can light a lot of curious trends that will allow virtual tether work adequately.
