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For those of you who have taken the GRE, which prep book did you find most useful? I'm debating between Kaplan, Barrons, Arco or Princeton Review...Thanks guys 🙂
Best GRE Prep Books?
- Thread starter OBGYN2010
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It really doesn't matter. The GRE is a really easy test. I would just buy the Kaplan or TPR book and the book of Kaplan vocabulary flash cards at Boarders.
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i say borrow those review books from the library instead, if you can. the cost doesn't justify the benefits.
if you are technically oriented, then the quantitative section shouldn't pose any problems. work through the exercises.
if the trouble is with verbal or the AWA, search on the web and download wordlists. memorize as many words as you can. all 4000 if you have to.
practice the writing topics given by ETS' website.
remember, you're competing with students from korea, china, india, who
will settle for nothing less than a 800Q 700+V and 5.5AWA.
if you are technically oriented, then the quantitative section shouldn't pose any problems. work through the exercises.
if the trouble is with verbal or the AWA, search on the web and download wordlists. memorize as many words as you can. all 4000 if you have to.
practice the writing topics given by ETS' website.
remember, you're competing with students from korea, china, india, who
will settle for nothing less than a 800Q 700+V and 5.5AWA.
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I had TPR and Kaplan with the CD-ROM exercises and diagnostics. The Kaplan CD was worthless. I took the practice tests and has NO idea where I would actually fall on the real test. It had me going from 790Q 410V to 450Q 700V, which was not encouraging. The books were realtively worthless, except for TPR verbal strategies and Kaplans word lists. If you retain basic geometry and algebra skills from undergrad/HS, you'll be fine on the math.
What killed me was not memorizing the word definitions as the GRE considers them, not common usage. Big difference in some cases.
As for the week before the test, get and take all of the GRE practice tests from the GRE website. I think they give you four tests and they were all very accurate in prediciting my score and giving me a sense of where I should study. Very, very helpful and completely free.
One thing the TPR book said that really made sense to me and was truly applicable was that the early questions mean a lot more than the later questions. The first 10 questions, for instance, pretty much narrow your score down to a 100 point range. Say you get the first 10 right, you are going to score 700-800, unless you totally miss the last 15 questions, you will be in that range. So even if you miss half those last questions, you'll be in the 700+ range. Whereas if you miss a lot of the first 10 questions you will have a tough time getting in the 700+ range even if you get all of the proceding questions right.
So long and short, I spent a lot of time making sure I was right on the first 15 questions and left relatively little time, i.e. 5 minutes, on the last 5-10 questions. The questions will get really hard if you do this strategy, but my math score was 50 points higher on the practice tests using this strategy than just giving equal weight in time to each question. On verbal, though, you either know it or you don't and it was tough for me to apply this since I used "my" definition instead of the GRE definition. They'll trick ya.
What killed me was not memorizing the word definitions as the GRE considers them, not common usage. Big difference in some cases.
As for the week before the test, get and take all of the GRE practice tests from the GRE website. I think they give you four tests and they were all very accurate in prediciting my score and giving me a sense of where I should study. Very, very helpful and completely free.
One thing the TPR book said that really made sense to me and was truly applicable was that the early questions mean a lot more than the later questions. The first 10 questions, for instance, pretty much narrow your score down to a 100 point range. Say you get the first 10 right, you are going to score 700-800, unless you totally miss the last 15 questions, you will be in that range. So even if you miss half those last questions, you'll be in the 700+ range. Whereas if you miss a lot of the first 10 questions you will have a tough time getting in the 700+ range even if you get all of the proceding questions right.
So long and short, I spent a lot of time making sure I was right on the first 15 questions and left relatively little time, i.e. 5 minutes, on the last 5-10 questions. The questions will get really hard if you do this strategy, but my math score was 50 points higher on the practice tests using this strategy than just giving equal weight in time to each question. On verbal, though, you either know it or you don't and it was tough for me to apply this since I used "my" definition instead of the GRE definition. They'll trick ya.
