will berkeley review verbal lower my score?

[hippocampus]

i hear a lot of bad things about BR verbal material. i am wondering if i should do them or not? im scared by doing them, the questions might mess up my thinking, and lower my verbal score even lower...

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[MediMama23]

To me, practice is practice, but if you're that scared, don't do them. I don't think any prep company has the right grasp on verbal, not even EK itself. To me, EK is just excessively hard, but most people think it's the most accurate. You could always try a couple of passages from TBR and see. I don't think TBR can LOWER your score...not knowing what to do with the passages and questions is what will lower your score. TBR's poor question/answer choices can only boost your score and your confidence, IF you have the right strategy. That said, what you really need is strategy: a way to break down the questions to get the right answers and a way to get through all of the passages so that you don't find yourself with a whole bunch of questions unanswered. That way, it won't matter where you get your questions from because you'll be able to effectively analyze any type of passage/question type.

 

[medworm]

I'm taking Berkeley Review right now -- and I'd say it's best suited for someone who needs the most help with Physics, Chem and OChem, and can sustain Bio/MCB/Genetics and verbal on your own.

The reason being that the head honcho, Todd, has been teaching for years. He's very patient and his expertise would help you in PS and the ochem portion of BS. The other teachers are just part-timers (unless you're in the Bay Area with Dale), and can't be relied on as much for office hours. That said, I think it complements the skills of my classmates very well, since most of them are Bio-type majors.

I agree that verbal is kinda crappy. But frankly, I'm not sure if any other review course has proven to help in that mystical area.

 

[dsh]

I don't think it will hurt you. The Berkeley verbal materials aren't that good because they're not representative of the actual test and aren't edited that well to boot. The passages are way too long and the book seems to go in sequential order of difficulty. The way they gauge difficulty is mainly by type of questions, so you'll notice that in the first quarter of the thing there'll be a bunch of nit-picky detail questions, and when you get to the end of the book, a lot of them are wierd reachy application type questions that a lot of people find hard.

I think that the EK is the best out there right now just for training purposes. It's sort of like the TBR science books that are way way too hard compared to aamc tests. For me, it makes the aamc test seem (relatively) easy, it's a nice boost. Some of the logic and stuff is a bit iffy, but not horribly wrong. Kaplan and Princeton have ones that are closer to the actual aamc tests.