Books for Prep | |
 - terribleThe other reviewers are right. I got this book because it was the only thing out there - I thought, whatever the rating, it can't be worse than nothing, at least there's a practice test. That's not a good reason! I was wrong! Just review your textbooks! Or maybe browse Wikipedia, if you don't have any textbooks... or just get some sleep... I couldn't even force myself to finish the practice test. As another reviewer notes, the very first question has the wrong answer listed. But even before you get to checking your answers, you'll notice all kinds of problems. The test is full of ambiguous or nonsensical wording, as well as simple typos. It does things with its questions that a real standardized test never will: for example, in at least one case it requires a correct answer to one question in order to get the next. Or, another example, it asks multiple questions that are purely about terminology. It has a bizarre balance of content - the question writers seem to be obsessed by context-free grammars. I could go on... This book is sufficiently bad that: 1) I regret buying it, and marking it up enough to make it impossible to return, as much because it means I gave money to a pack of fraudsters as because I wasted time taking half the practice test. 2) I would never consider buying another book not just from this author, but from this publisher. 3) If I ever meet Dr. Benjamin Wells, I have every intention of punching him in the face. After due consideration, no jury would convict. Rating: - a comprehensive mistakeFrom a senior at the Missouri University of Science and Technology studying both computer science and computer engineering: The practice exam enclosed in this book does not closely match with the present exam made available by ETS 'for free' online. For example, a much larger percent of the questions in this book's exam are hardware related instead of CS theory or math background related. Worse yet, this book's review sections prior to the sample exam are shallow at best. The most entertaining of these was the 'More Specialized Knowledge' section, which was seven pages in length, with at most two paragraphs devoted to categories such as 'Networks', 'Protocols', 'Encryption, Compression, and Error Correction', 'Heuristic Search', 'Parallel Computation', etc. There's even a note at the end of this section that attempts to make up for these "surveys" with a feint of reassurance: 'Even when you study every single topic in every practice exam, even if you kept every text from every undergraduate course, even if you take the exam twice, you will miss something.' Profound, at the toddler level. Most unsettling, the practice test is littered with mistakes. Clear, obvious, blatant mistakes that a freshman in CS could pick out! Prime examples include question 1 - the key incorrectly accomplishes a post-order tree-traversal, question 16 - the key does not apply the definition of the tree depth correctly, and question 29 - where the key cites an answer choice that is not associated with the answer value it claims is correct! Rating: - The easiest way to sabotage your test grade.I guarantee that using this book will lower your CS GRE score, between the misinformation and errors it contains and the time you'll waste that could be spent on more useful review tactics. I can only hope I stopped reading it soon enough. Interestingly enough, the author of the brief review section goes on a rant about what makes a bad practice test, in which he manages to describe many features of the practice test in the book itself. I wonder if he saw the questions that had been written by an outsourced team, felt a little remorse, and decided to give a bit of a warning to careful readers to atone for the fact that he'll profit from having his name on this piece of trash. Or maybe he never saw the test questions. Or maybe I'm giving him too much of the benefit of the doubt, and he's simply an astounding hypocrite who knows that you can sell anything as a test review book. Rating: - Author ReviewsInterestingly enough, the author of this book can be found slamming other books on their review page. Maybe thats a good thing, since judging by the reviews here, he may know what it takes to put out garbage. Rating: - Disturbingly bad.Like other reviewers, I bought this book because it was in-stock. Like other reviewers, I found the book... lacking in correctness. It's hard to study for a test from a book that has incorrect answers. I have _ZERO_ confidence that this book has in ANY way prepared me for the CompSci GRE test :( I wish I had read the reviews before purchasing this, and both the author and publisher will be getting a nastygram about this one. In association with Amazon.com | |