With countless GMAT prep books out there claiming to be the best option on the market, even the process of deciding what study materials to work with can be daunting. What’s the best GMAT prep book for an ambitious MBA applicant today, and which books are just wasting your time?
This article looks at the pros and cons of a selection of popular GMAT prep books for 2024-2025 (that is, books covering the GMAT Focus Edition).
Our conclusion: GMAC’s own GMAT Official Guide Bundle 2024–2025 comes out on top. Keep reading to see why it outshines the competition.
| GMAC | Manhattan Prep | Princeton Review | PowerScore | Kaplan | |
| Title | GMAT Official Guide Bundle 2024–2025 | All the GMAT (8th ed.) | GMAT Focus Premium Prep (35th ed.) | GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible (2022 ed.) | GMAT 800 (9th ed.) |
| Official? | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Year | 2024 | 2024 | 2024 | 2022 | 2014 |
| Number of books | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Pricing (current Amazon price, paperback) | $69.99 ($32.99 for just the main Guide) | $102.49 | $30.72 | $29.00 | $15.94 |
| Page count | 1,808 (880 in just the main Guide) | 1,200 | 640 | 378 | 384 |
| Real practice questions included | 1,600+ | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Summary | The best option because it’s packed with real questions from past exams | A large selection of practice problems for different subjects, but lacking in quality control | A generic test prep book that gives you background on relevant subjects but doesn’t feel specific to the GMAT | A book focused exclusively on Critical Reasoning questions, but again without authentic GMAT material | A book ostensibly for those targeting very high scores, but doesn’t live up to that promise |
| GMAC |
| Title: GMAT Official Guide Bundle 2024–2025 |
| Official? Yes |
| Year: 2024 |
| Number of books: 4 |
| Pricing (current Amazon price, paperback): $69.99 ($32.99 for just the main Guide) |
| Page count: 1,808 (880 in just the main Guide) |
| Real practice questions included: 1,600+ |
| Summary: The best option because it’s packed with real questions from past exams |
Our clear top pick is the GMAT Official Guide Bundle 2024–2025 —published by GMAC, the company responsible for the GMAT itself. This is a set of four books:
At the time of writing, the full set (in paperback) is available for $69.99 on Amazon. The individual books are also sold separately. If you want to get just one, the essential book is the main GMAT Official Guide 2024–2025—the largest volume, available for $32.99 and providing detailed coverage of every section of the exam.
The full set, though, is good value. The volumes on individual exam sections have their own practice questions; they don’t just repeat material from the main Guide.
In addition to the books, you get 250+ additional questions (along with all the questions from the books) in the “Online Question Bank” included with the purchase, with which you can build custom practice sets, take diagnostic quizzes, and test yourself with flash cards.
GMAC’s Official Guide set has a lot of advantages: comprehensive coverage of the different exam sections, a very generous quantity of practice materials, at a lower price than some competitors with less content. But the unique selling point is more important: these are the only GMAT prep books featuring real questions from past exams.
That’s essential because, while the questions included are of course not exactly the same as the ones you’ll see on your test, they’re fully authentic examples of the question types you will encounter.
GMAT questions are designed to be counterintuitive, forcing the test taker to think carefully and “spot the con.” That is to say, this is a unique style of exam that can easily trip you up, and only familiarity with real GMAT questions will teach you the skills needed to approach the test correctly.
The introductory chapters of the Official Guide explain the exam concept and give general advice on prepping. Next, there’s a series of review chapters guiding you through all the basics you’ll need on the exam (math concepts, methods of reasoning, etc.). Finally, taking up the bulk of the book are chapters full of practice questions for each section.
Following each practice set is not only an answer key but a full demonstration of the logic used to arrive at the answer to each and every question. As the book itself emphasizes, working through as many questions as possible is less important than ensuring you really understand the logic behind each question you attempt, so this material is indispensable.
The other three GMAC Official Guide publications are essentially collections of additional questions to supplement those in the main book. These are a valuable resource, but we don’t recommend just plowing through all four books at once. Instead,
If the official prep books are really all you need, why are there so many competitors out there publishing their own versions? To put it plainly, test prep companies are incentivized to churn out a lot of material and convince prospective test takers that they need it.
The problem, of course, is that these companies don’t make the exam and can’t sell you actual GMAT questions. So they create their own “simulated” GMAT questions—intended to imitate real GMAT questions but never closely resembling the real thing.
Why can’t these “inauthentic” questions be just as good as the real thing? The answer relates to cost: GMAC spends around $2,500 developing each question, meaning the development of a 64-question GMAT exam costs them around $200,000. That’s money no test prep company can afford to spend on “imitation” questions.
Third-party test prep companies tend to emphasize the sheer quantity of questions they provide as a key selling point. Always bear in mind that these are cheaply developed imitation questions.
You can work through thousands of these kinds of questions, but if they’re not accurate to what you’ll encounter on exam day, you’re just wasting time. Solving a company’s in-house practice questions will mainly teach you strategies for solving … more of that company’s questions.
With all that said, below are more specific reviews of some popular third-party GMAT prep books.
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| Manhattan Prep |
| Title: All the GMAT (8th ed.) |
| Official? No |
| Year: 2024 |
| Number of books: 2 |
| Pricing (current Amazon price, paperback): $102.49 |
| Page count: 1,200 |
| Real practice questions included: 0 |
| Summary: A large selection of practice problems for different subjects, but lacking in quality control |
Manhattan Prep, a subsidiary of Kaplan known for its bulky test prep books, offers a two-book set for the GMAT: All the GMAT (8th ed.)—currently selling on Amazon for the rather steep price of $102.49. The two books are
Like other Manhattan Prep publications, these books provide a collection of practice problems for all the question types that can come up on the exam, paired with explanatory sections that walk you through the concepts underpinning these questions.
As explained above, these practice problems are not real GMAT questions. The book is subdivided into far more sections than the exam, and though its questions certainly cover the same concepts that will show up on the exam, you won’t find them split into such tidy categories (“Exponents,” “Roots,” “Formulas,” etc.) on the real GMAT.
There are also online materials included with the bundle: an online syllabus, a bonus ebook with tougher Quant questions, and solutions to the problems from GMAC’s own Official Guide. The last inclusion is strange: the Official Guide already contains solutions to its own questions, and these answers are useless to you unless you own the Guide already.
A look at the Amazon reviews for the bundle also reveals the pitfalls of the publishing model: many reviewers complain of a wide range of errors in the questions and answers: “Wrong calculations at very basic levels … typos that don’t make sense”; “a lot of typos … explanations that are somewhat ham-fisted”; “numerous typos and spelling errors.”
It’s worth noting that even the more positive reviewers sometimes found that the book didn’t move their GMAT score: one reviewer of the Quant + DI book states that it “made no difference at all to my score … I have heard similar feedback since from other candidates.”
| Princeton Review |
| Title: GMAT Focus Premium Prep (35th ed.) |
| Official? No |
| Year: 2024 |
| Number of books: 1 |
| Pricing (current Amazon price, paperback): $30.72 |
| Page count: 640 |
| Real practice questions included: 0 |
| Summary: A generic test prep book that gives you background on relevant subjects but doesn’t feel specific to the GMAT |
Princeton Review is another well-known company in the test prep industry, providing books and courses covering exams such as the GRE and, of course, the GMAT. Their current GMAT publication is entitled GMAT Focus Premium Prep (35th ed.). It’s currently available for $29.70 on Amazon.
As the title suggests, it’s a recent publication that’s been adjusted to reflect the introduction of the new GMAT Focus Edition. In fact, as you might guess from the high edition number, Princeton publishes new editions of its guides very frequently, generally on a yearly basis, regardless of whether any significant changes have been made to the test in the meantime.
The structure of the book differs from some other test prep publications: the bulk of it is explanatory materials, providing general reviews of key concepts and strategies for how to approach certain question types.
Also included are two diagnostic tests (with answers and explanations) assessing your current readiness for the test. The first test comes at the start of the book, the second toward the end. And three other computer-administered tests are included with the purchase, allowing you to practice online and get an experience somewhat closer to the real exam.
The key problem we’ve encountered with Princeton’s materials is likely a result of the fact that they aim to cover a wide variety of tests, not specialize in the GMAT or any other specific exam. Because of this, their questions and explanations tend to feel somewhat mass-produced and fail to capture the unique qualities of the GMAT accurately.
| PowerScore |
| Title: GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible (2022 ed.) |
| Official? No |
| Year: 2022 |
| Number of books: 1 |
| Pricing (current Amazon price, paperback): $29.00 |
| Page count: 378 |
| Real practice questions included: 0 |
| Summary: A book focused exclusively on Critical Reasoning questions, but again without authentic GMAT material |
A more specialized book that often comes up in discussions of GMAT preparation is PowerScore’s GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible (2022 ed.). This book focuses explicitly on Critical Reasoning questions, one of two question types in the Verbal section of the current GMAT exam. It’s currently going for $18.39 on Amazon.
Due to its niche focus, this book isn’t going to help you with other parts of the exam (although the publisher does claim the strategies it teaches can also help with Reading Comprehension questions). Instead, it aims to provide a comprehensive consideration of all the different types of Critical Reasoning questions that can come up.
As such, its chapters are based on these different question types (along with a few chapters dealing with more general principles, e.g. “Cause and Effect Reasoning”). Note that the questions in the exam aren’t explicitly divided into categories like those in the book, though the different types are recognizable by key phrases that appear in the questions.
The book has developed a reputation as a good way to approach this tricky question type for exam takers who are struggling to get to grips with it. Besides its narrow scope, the downsides of the book are the same as those of other test prep options: though it aims to familiarize you with GMAT logic, its practice questions are created by the author and therefore ultimately not authentic to the style of the real thing.
| Kaplan |
| Title: GMAT 800 (9th ed.) |
| Official? No |
| Year: 2014 |
| Number of books: 1 |
| Pricing (current Amazon price, paperback): $15.94 |
| Page count: 384 |
| Real practice questions included: 0 |
| Summary: A book ostensibly for those targeting very high scores, but doesn’t live up to that promise |
Kaplan’s GMAT 800 (9th ed.) is a little different from other books in the list: as the title suggests, it’s targeting an audience of ambitious test takers who want to achieve a GMAT score above the 90th percentile. It currently sells for $48 on Amazon.
This is essentially a collection of tough practice questions, designed to be equivalent to the toughest material you’ll encounter on the exam. It offers little in the way of guidance other than the answers and explanations to the questions—no review sections covering underlying math or language concepts.
That’s not to say there’s no useful advice here, just that it’s scattered throughout the answers to different questions rather than compiled in one place. As such, we certainly can’t recommend this as your only GMAT prep book; it’s clearly targeting readers who have already purchased other books (from Kaplan or other publishers).
Besides the structure, the book’s Amazon reviews sometimes complain that the questions are not actually up to the high standards the title claims: “the questions are actually quite easy”; “way too easy”; “to appeal to a broad audience, Kaplan designed this book at a 650/700-level.” One reviewer also questions the correctness of the book’s materials, calling it “riddled with errors … at least one mistake in every section so far.”
Applicants targeting the very highest scores shouldn’t settle for unreliable materials like this. In fact, they’re better advised to look into GMAT prep courses rather than self-study materials that make big promises.
In terms of GMAT prep materials, nothing beats the real thing: authentic questions from past exams and direct advice from the makers of the test. That’s why the GMAT Official Guide Bundle 2024–2025 is the best GMAT prep book (set) out there.
That principle also informs the design of Menlo Coaching’s GMAT Prep Course. We know that ambitious applicants are looking for more than just self-study from the official materials. That’s why we offer a curriculum based wholly on the official books (not our own proprietary publications), building on this foundation with live instruction from expert GMAT tutors.
Menlo Coaching’s five-week course uses authentic test questions from the books and a structure designed to closely reflect that of the real exam. If you’re serious about achieving an exceptional GMAT score, skip the inauthentic third-party test prep books, and go for the best.
