Books for Prep | |
 - Almost worse than no book at allI just took the Psych GRE's and used both this book and the Princeton Review 5 th edition book. There were many, many problems with the Baron's book. If I had to choose the main issue, I would have to say the the authors acted very irresponsibly putting it together. I'm not really sure what the goal they had was, but it didn't appear to be helping you do well on the GRE. The review material in the book alternates between lengthy explanations of psychological matters and very brief listings in an outline format. Unfortunately, neither of these presentations work very well with giving you useful information. The paragraphs often are concerned with obscure topics that will not appear on the test and almost always contain a level of unusable detail that sometimes confuses what the actual important points are. The outlines, on the other hand, seem to be aimed more at giving you a list of stuff that you should go look up in other books. They give away as little information as possible. A good example of this is from the illusion section of perception, where they give you an (overly lengthy) list of visual illusions but never tell or show you what these illusions actually are. As a side note, none of the official reveiw material from ETS nor the test I took contained any questions on illusions. This paradoxical trend of simultaneously giving you both more and less information that you need continues throughout the book. The authors have even included an entire chapter of what they call "Applied Psychology" that, as far as I can tell, has never and will never appear on a Psych GRE. At the same time, as they do at the end of every section, they give you a list of some 6 books that you should read if you want to learn about some of the stuff they've put incomplete references to. While I wouldn't complain so much if the grossly expanded information covered all of the information on the GRE, there were more than a few questions from the real test whose principles I couldn't find in this book, even after going back after the test. Another example of this irresponsiblity comes from the slant that they take on some of the material, most specifically the drug section. Far from psychologists trying to prepare you for a test on the effects of these drugs, the authors sound more like Nancy Regan or a couple of 50 year olds trying to write an afterschool special. Readers are warned that because of alcohol's addictive nature, withdraw symptoms could include irritability, sleeplessness, siezures, or even death! In another section, we are told that alternate names for nicotine delivering drugs are "smokes", "weeds", or "coffin nails". A final complaint is with the six tests that are included with the books. Billed as being accurate judges of your possible performance on the GRE and thus giving you a good idea of which areas you are weak in, these tests instead bombard you with questions about the obscure information and minute details that the authors included in the book. My score in these tests didn't correspond well with other indepent assessments or the score I got on the two previously given Psych GRE tests I got from ETS, nor hopefully will it reflect my score on the actual test. page 2 of 2
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