Customer Reviews

Gre Computer Science (REA Test Preps)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I really can't say enough bad things about this book. I looked at the reviews below, decided "something is better than nothing", and bought it anyways. Everyone below is correct -- the book is filled with typos, stupid questions, and questions that resembled the actual test only in that they were multiple choice. The first test in the book is sort-of-okay, the other three are dreck. Don't buy this book. Sorry, Amazon.

I am a computer science student at MIT. I read portions of this book before I had to burn it. With so much wrong information, this book is not only useless, but also harmful.

They wrote the book and never read it again! At least they could correct typos. Well the material is inconsistent, questions are weird, answers are incorrect. I have doubts that they've never seen a real GRE test. Don't waste your money and your nerves.

This book is one of the very few preparations books for the Comp. Sci. GRE, but that does NOT make it useful. I bought it out of desperation for anything, but it bore no resemblence to the actual exam, was filled with errors, and the descriptions of the answers are incomprehensible.

If you want a preparation book, just do the practice test ETS sends you and talk to your prof about the ones you didn't know. That will help you much more than this book, and will give you a solid preparation.

If I could go lower than one start I would. This book was test preparation trash. I looked at Amazon and since they were out of stock I bought at a brick-and-mortar establishment. Unfortunately I didn't read the reviews are even glance at the ranking and can only hope others might and save their dough.

Typos, worthless and dumb questions, etc. You name a bad way to craft a test and REA did it. One horrible thing was how ambiguous the questions were. I went over 3 of the 4 test before throwing up my hands in disgust. I went over the 1st test in detail with a friend and we found that almost each question with many factors of the question ambiguous or assumptions (incorrect sometimes) that were not stated at all, let alone clearly.

I recently took the real thing and this book did nothing outside of practicing picking A,B,C,D or E.

A definite DO NOT BUY!!!!

This book is absolutely horrible. Like the other 11 reviewers have noted, this book is loaded with typos and contains information that's just plain wrong. Save yourself the cash and the potential nightmare associated with the purchasing of this book by spending your time and money on something else.

The professors and editors who collaborated to put this piece of worthless compilations of tests together get a big fat F from me! The so called "detailed" explanations are esoteric and vague. What makes for a good Computer Science GRE test prep book would be one that goes over the various topics and tries to cover the fundamental to intermediate concepts. This book does nothing of that nature as it simply lists four mock tests w/ brief descriptions to each question at the end of the test section. It seems like a few people got together one weekend and lumped together 300 or so questions from their lecture notes and then divided it by four tests to make a book. Completely useless book!

OK, this book is terrible, like everyone said. I didn't buy it: I got it free from a colleague at work. I used it for the sole purpose of practicing answering CS-type questions quickly and filling in the bubbles. Here are a few of my pet peeves:

1) The book assumes an expert-level knowledge of PASCAL and no knowledge of C. The sample test from ETS requred only basic C and PASCAL. Since I didn't know PASCAL at all (who does these days?) until I studied for the GRE, I really hope that the ETS test is closer to the real thing.

2) Questions that are far more difficult (both in terms of knowledge required and time required to answer) than anything in the ETS sample GRE. There are questions where the "explanation" is more than 2 pages long.

3) Errors. To take one example I just met, they think that f(n) = n is a constant function.

4) Ambiguity/unstated assumptions in question.

To sum up, yes, this book [bites]. Don't pay any money for it. And come on -- will someone out there write a decent GRE CS review book??

This book contains four "sample" GRE tests. After going through them though I doubt the authors ever bothered to look up the word "sample" in a dictionary. These tests are horrible. The questions are ill-conceived, outdated, and bear little to no resembelance to actual GRE exams. Stay away from this book, stay far away.

Having read all the reviews I am not quite sure why people are so unhappy. Yes, this is not an exciting page turner, but it is not supposed to be. It sais on the cover "4 Full-Length Exams" and this is what you get, sample exams and explanations for questions. There will never be a book that will tell you how to "crack" the CS GRE, because such a book would have to contain the information of about five textbooks.

The only way to study for a CS GRE is to use this book to get an idea of the questions (plus the sample test ETS sends you). If you cannot answer the question then go to a textbook and read the corresponding chapters, so when you come back you can answer the question.

Ideally, you are a CS Junior in Undergrad and know that you will be taking this test. This way study for this from the start, while still in class.