Getting the Conquer Series Study Guide to Actually Work
The Conquer Series Study Guide is a collection of practice materials designed for competitive exams, mostly targeting civil service and law school entrance tests in Southeast Asia. It covers quantitative reasoning, verbal aptitude, and analytical reading. I picked it up around 2019 when I was prepping for a promotion exam, and it turned out to be one of the few resources that actually mirrored the difficulty level of the real thing. A lot of study guides look good on paper but fall apart when you try to use them under time pressure. This one doesn't, mostly because the question styles are close to what you'll see on the actual test. The main issue is that it's not updated as often as it should be, so some of the older editions have questions that feel dated. You can download the latest edition directly from the Conquer Series official website, which is conquerseries.ph. They offer both free sample chapters and full paid versions depending on your needs. There are also third-party sites offering cracked PDFs, but I wouldn't bother. The formatting breaks, pages get misnumbered, and some of the answer keys turn out to be wrong in the leaked versions. The official version costs around 850 pesos for the full bundle, and the free sample usually includes 30 questions across all three subjects. It's worth downloading the sample first to see if the difficulty matches what you're aiming for before spending money. Most people just open the book and start answering questions cold. That's not the right approach. I learned this the hard way after blowing through the first edition in two weeks and realizing my scores barely moved. The guide works best when you treat it as a diagnostic tool first, then a practice tool, and only then as a review resource. Here's how I structured it.
Start by taking one timed section without any reference materials. The quantitative section gives you 60 questions in 60 minutes. If you're not used to that pace, you'll finish with maybe 35 answered and half of them wrong. That baseline score matters more than anything else. Write it down. Then look at your errors. The Conquer Series Study Guide includes answer explanations, but they're terse. You'll need to figure out why a particular method was chosen over another. For instance, in ratio problems, the guide often uses the cross-multiplication shortcut. Some test-takers find it faster, but if the numbers involve fractions or percentages, it actually slows you down. I switched to the unitary method for those and improved my speed by about 20 percent across the section. After the diagnostic, go back to the same section and rework every question you missed. Don't just read the explanation. Sit with it for at least five minutes. The pattern recognition part of this exam rewards people who've seen the same question type dressed in different clothing. The guide does a decent job of rotating formats, but you have to be the one connecting them.
What the Guide Gets Wrong
The verbal section has a noticeable gap in vocabulary building. It throws words at you in context, which helps marginally, but if your base vocabulary is weak, you'll coast on process of elimination rather than actual understanding. I spent about three weeks doing 20 new words a day alongside the guide and saw a meaningful jump in that section. The analytical reading part is stronger, but the passages tend to lean heavily on science and law topics. If your exam has a heavier business or social science slant, you'll want supplemental material. The numerical reasoning section has a known edge case that the guide never addresses directly. When a problem involves successive percentage changes, like a price that goes up 20 percent and then down 15 percent, the guide shows you multiplying the decimals straight through. That works. But when the numbers get messy, say something like 37 percent and 23 percent, the multiplication path gets ugly fast. I found that converting to fractions and using estimation to narrow the answer choices first cut my time per question from about 90 seconds to under 40 seconds. The guide doesn't mention this trick, and that's the kind of thing that separates people who finish the section from people who don't.
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Practical Limits of This Resource
It's not a complete preparation package. If you're starting from zero in math, this guide will frustrate you. The quantitative sections assume you already know algebra and basic arithmetic. There's a separate workbook called the Conquer Math Booster that covers fundamentals, and I'd recommend pairing that with the main guide if your diagnostic score is below 40 percent. The reading comprehension passages are also shorter than what you'll see on actual exams, so you'll want to supplement with GRE-style passages or old civil service review modules to build stamina for longer texts. The guide is best for people who have already studied the basics and need focused practice. It's not a textbook. Treat it like a practice exam bank with explanations, not a learning tool from scratch. If you need conceptual instruction, pair it with online videos or a review center. If you're already comfortable with the material, this will sharpen your speed and accuracy in about six to eight weeks of consistent use, assuming you spend roughly 90 minutes a day on it.
Common Mistakes People Make With the Conquer Series Study Guide
The biggest mistake is doing questions passively. Reading the answer and nodding along doesn't teach you anything. The second biggest mistake is not tracking which question types take you the longest. I kept an error log for the final month before my exam, and it revealed that I was spending nearly twice as long on geometry problems compared to data sufficiency, even though geometry questions were easier overall. Switching my order to tackle data sufficiency first and coming back to geometry afterward improved my total completed questions by about eight per section. The guide itself is solid. The explanation quality is better than most local review materials. The pacing is right. The cost is reasonable. Just don't expect it to do everything for you. It's a tool, not a guarantee, and it works best when you bring your own structure to it.
