Customer Reviews

GRE Math Bible

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The Good: Book is good with regard to question difficulty and number of questions provided. I have heard that the "very hard" questions are much harder than anything on the actual GRE, which is good for purposes of practice and learning the concepts.

The Bad: The explanations provided for some of the more difficult questions are often vague and confusing. They assume you already know certain concepts not included in the introduction of each section. They are also a few instances where the question did not match the answer/explanation--i.e., they answer referred to a totally different question which wasn't included. Also, there are instances where they change the #s in the answer from that listed in the question. All of this gets confusing and frustrating.

Overall: This is a great book for additional practice problems but should be used as a suplement to books geared toward learning the basics/tactics; like Barrons, Kaplan, etc. Thus, its great for reinforcing what you should know for the GRE quant section.

This is a great book to get more tricks and knowledge for the quantitative part of the GRE. It has hundreds of exercises of several types, it is well-written and reviews in detail every subject tested in quantitativeGRE. Finally, it has a good, thorough diagnosis test.

However, there are some nasty mistakes in the resolutions (usually 1/2 per chapter). In addition, the exercises groups are not organized by time. This implies a little bit of creativity and extra work for you to find the really quickest ways to solve the exercises in the CAT-type exam. A nice way to fix the last problem would be a CD with CAT exercises, like those offered by Kaplan.

In summary, if you have a book for general preparation (like the ones sold by Kaplan) and you really need to have a high quantitative score (for those who want to attend courses like computer sciences, physics or economics), this one will be a great complement!

[Dec 1, 2010]: The newer version of the book Nova's GRE Math Bible is Nova's GRE Math prep course, available here at Amazon.

I hope to have found what i need to prepare for the Gre quantitative and have good scores. Before buying this product i tried the most known ones, Kaplan, Princeton Review and Barron among others, but they have all been of little use. My first GRE scores were poor, especially the math section of the test.
This book seems more detailed than others, with good explanations and, most of all,it avoids giving you the supposedly "magic tricks" to solve maths problems without using the proper math calculations and algebra (like many other books do ) which, in the end, it's not the best way to get the right answers.
The only problem is that some solutions suggested are not the fastest, and time is crucial in the GRE test.
Overall, it's a good practice book and it's worth buying.

Dana Ports Rinaldi

The practice questions in this book are, in my opinion, nothing like the ones I've found in past tests and official GRE test prep material. They're often rather complicated and convoluted, which isn't a problem in itself. But the math questions in the GRE usually have "shortcut" solutions built in if you can train yourself to spot them, while the questions in this book don't, or else they're too tricky to be of use. I find myself either completely stumped or doing long, ridiculous calculations with all sorts of long division and whatnot, neither of which are very productive practice for GRE prep. I'll stick with the official material, thanks.

I found a copy of this book online through my University. I have already taken the GRE once and had trouble with some of the most simple math, even though I had been using the Princeton Review "Cracking the GRE" study guide. This book (The GRE Math Bible) provided WAY more information and WAY more practice problems at a level that is comparable to/beyond the level of difficulty you see in the GRE. This book encourages you to actually learn how to do the math rather than "foolproof quick tricks" to get the answers without knowing the math (as other GRE prep books do). Because I had a hard time learning the Princeton Review "shortcuts" methods - this book has been far more helpful for me in the my studies. The "bible" also breaks math down into many comprehensive sections that focus on ways to solve different types of problems as well as different types of math.

The only major complaint I have is that the explanations of the solutions are not always the easiest to follow - they require that you think outside of the box in a way - despite the fact that you can get the correct answers often using more than one method. Also, note that the book is REALLY long and takes a bit of time to get through, so this is not the most efficient way to study if you can't devote a full 8-hr day to studying for the GRE.

Despite it's downfalls, I would recommend this to anyone who has taken a break from math for a while, and would rather learn how to do the math than learn tricks to get the right answer without doing the math.

The NOVA GRE Math Bible is a good resource for gaining experience working on problems that are much more difficult than the actual test -- however, the book doesn't provide a consistent process, or methodology, for solving their problems. This means that the solution to one problem will not necessarily be applicable to other problems of a similar kind, not like, say, determining whether or not two triangles are similar, or calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle with the length of two sides given. So don't expect shortcuts and magic tricks out of this book. If you can work under those circumstances, the book does give you enough exposure to difficult problems, and forces you to use your creative problem solving skills, which no other book on the market does quite as well.