Customer Reviews

GRE Psychology (REA) - The Best Test Prep for the GRE (GRE Test Preparation)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

After taking the GRE, I realize that this book did not help me in my preparations. All it managed to do was upset me into thinking I was going to do terrible on the exam. The questions were 10x harder than the exam itself. Also, to my chagrine, the book did not have any review outlines in it - an essential part of test preparation.

All that this book contains are practice tests, which although helpful, are not sufficient review material. There is no review section, and answers to questions are not well explained, despite what the author's might think. The answers only discuss the correct answer, and do define the other terms or indicate why they are wrong. As well, the test questions are not broken down into subtests, even for scoring purposes, so they are of little diagnostic help.

First of all, do not use this book as your only means of studying--it only contains practice tests with brief answer explanations. I would recommend the "Cracking the GRE Psycholgy" by Princton Review in addition to reviewing your old text books. Second, after taking the actual GRE psychology test, I realized that the tests in "The Best Test Preparation for the GRE Psychology Test" are not very representative of the actual thing. The tests in this book contain a lot of "none of the above, all of the above, only A and B, only C and D" type questions. There were none of these on the actual test. These questions made it more difficult to practice process of elimination techniques and made the questions more difficult to make educated guesses on (which you will be doing a lot of on the actual exam). Perhaps this book would be helpful in learning to pace yourself and building up stamina for such a lengthy test, but I would recommend getting practice tests from ETS rather than a company who "bases test questions off of ETS questions."

I spent a number of weeks using this book, it was quite helpful... do the questions over and over... understand why your right answers are right and your wrong answers are wrong and you can't go wrong... between this book and wikipedia you're set. Like I said, this was my only GRE psych prep book and I never even took intro to psych as an undergraduate and pulled a 680 using it. I was a psych undergrad but CLEP'd out of intro. Good resource... It's true that there are no test taking techniques in this book... if you need test strategies get the Princeton or Kaplan book.

I used the same brand book to study for the GRE's and took a class, and felt the book and practice was just as good as the class I paid a lot of money to take. So for the subject tests I'm just using this. It gives strategy, but most importantly practice tests. I work part time in educational psychology and what I tell parents, and what I understand, is that with standardized testing the best way to increase your score, (other than taking more classes and studying over periods of time--and realistically who is taking that much time and energy for a test), is just knowing how to test well by knowing the strategy of the test and feeling comfortable with the format. There is only so much more knowledge you can cram into your head before a test like this, so I think time is better spent by understanding it and taking as many full length tests as you can, rather than focusing on content knowledge (unless you have the time to cover a lot of content).
this book is useful in both aspects.

DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. Total waste of money. Here's why:

1. This book provides no review material whatsoever. It consists of a couple tests and a CD-Rom which has the SAME tests.

2. The answers to the test questions are not thorough. Reading over 200 answers will not help you learn the material well, as the questions and information are in random order. This is a very inefficient way to study and difficult for consolidating new information.

3. The GRE Psychology test is paper written. I wish I knew before I bought this so-called review book with its CD-rom. It is important to practice taking the test in the format it will be given in.

4. Buy a Kaplan Guide--they're cheaper anyway. With this book you're going to have to obtain an Introductory Psych textbook.

Dont even bother with this seller. They dont seem to care about getting the product to their customer, or providing what they described.

An excellent book because all you really need to study for the psych GREs is a good introductory psych textbook and and some practice tests that this book provides. I should know, I scored a 99th percentile!

Although I only received a 500 (23%) on the actual exam, that was only because I crammed and didn't try to adequately prepare and study for the exam. It wasn't the publisher's fault, but rather my poor preparation. I'm supposed to rate the book's content and that is what I'm doing. This in combination with either the Princeton Review or Kaplan GRE Psychology will put you over the top. Visit 123collegedegree.com for more study material.