Books for Prep | |
 - Great Prep BookAs a professor, I have used Kaplan materials for over 7 years to teach a prep course for my university. I find the Kaplan materials to be at a realistic testing level and have found that student's scores on the actual exam correlate very well with post course testing exams in the classroom. Many books are too easy and students develop unrealistic expectations. The verbal prep and math prep together with this edition provide an excellent study course. Rating:  - Nothing really special...These GRE study guides are all overrated... I first purchased an Arco study guide for the GRE and it helped me brush up on my rusty math skills and didn't really do anything else. So I then purchased Kaplan in hopes of finding better practice tests and a little more help on the verbal section. Kaplan didn't do much for this either, although the book does provide a list some "hit" words (not very many though). Also, the math that Kaplan has on its practice tests are significantly harder (and scored in a much tougher fashion) than the actual ETS GRE exam and I found this needlessly discouraging and frustrating. The best advice I would give to future GRE test-takers would be to use the actual ETS practice tests and practice questions that are on the CD-ROM that ETS provides. I also memorized every word in the Princeton Review's "Word Smart for the GRE" and that was a TREMENDOUS help. I ended up scoring: V 670, Q 590 Good luck! Rating: - excellent book to help you prepareI bought this book and started using it about 6 weeks before my GRE test, which was today. I hadn't taken a standardized test in the past 10 years, but I managed to pull off an above average score in both the Verbal and Quantitative sections. I would say the only negative thing about the book and included software, is the the way the software practice problems are presented. It would be great to see software that would emulate the actual screens of the GRE and behavior of a computer-adaptive test more closely as well as provide scores for all the practice problems, not just the full tests. I think Kaplan pushes you do perform better by setting the bar on their tests much higher than the actual GRE. If you combine this with the free POWERPREP software from the ETS website, I truly believe that you will be more than adequately prepared for the GRE. Good luck! Rating: - Somewhat good review but their proofreaders need to be firedI found the reviews helpful although I found that powerprep software actually helped me out more. But one thing is the amount of mistakes their book and software has! Come on now....students are relying on Kaplan's to help them with the GRE and their proofreaders can't even help with that. Two Examples: 1. In the software, I chose the right answer and it marked it wrong. Even in its explanation it stated "The answer is 25,000 which makes the answer (D)". But actually 25,000 was answer (C) which is what I picked. 2. In the explanations for a couple of math problem...they explained completely different problems with different numbers! Talk about annoying. I'm buying a Barron's right now.... Rating: - GRE BookThis book was really helpful to get me in shape for the GRE. It was a great introduction to the test, and I felt 100% more prepared than I would have been if I had not had this book. I would recommend it because of all the great resources you get with it. In association with Amazon.com | |