Cracking the Mat, 3rd Edition

A great guide. Gives you an idea of how the test's creators think, along with a strategy for identifying and solving different types of analogies. I used this guide along with the practice tests in Kaplan's an hour or so each day for a week preceding the exam and got a scaled score of 461 - 99th percentile in my field and overall. Highly recommend.

This book consists of sections where they tell you how to figure out the questions and how to "out think" the test writers. This part was informative, but if you've ever taken any kind of standardized test before, this is all second nature. The part I found the most useful was the actual "study guides". They had a vocab section with words and definitions, a science where they went over the major information on the MAT, a culture section, where they reviewed famous authors, artists, etc (the most useful to me, since I didn't know any of that stuff!!). I took a practice test before I did the little review sections, and the tests after I studied the review sections showed huge improvements in my score. However, **BE CAREFUL WITH THE ANSWER KEY! THERE ARE ERRORS!** I've found several so far, am I'm not done with the book yet!!! However, they're fairly easy to spot, if you use common sense. If you sincerely doubt an answer's validity, look it up. I found the correct answers elsewhere in the book.