Customer Reviews

Kaplan GRE Exam 2010: Strategies, Practice, and Review

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I am taking the GRE to get into a phd program. My field is English. Consequently, I need a great deal of help with math. A faculty member at my university recommended Kaplan.

This edition is atrocious. There are printing mistakes galore and math errors so horrendous that even I can pick them out. Vocabulary and verbal section seem ok, but don't trust anything in the quantitative section.
I was relying on you, Kaplan. I am now warning every grad student and aspiring grad student I know to avoid your books at all costs.

Kaplan is supposed to be one of the premier standardized test preparation institutions. The GRE 2010 edition is indeed full of errors which hinder studying and this is just sad. Kaplan does not deserve their esteemed reputation if they put out garbage like this. If you are looking for a guide to help you study for the GRE I would go with Princeton Review.

If you value your sanity, please do not buy this book. The math practice section is full of errors: missing zeros, plus signs substituted for equal signs and so on. As a result, questions do not make sense and answers are incorrect. Save yourself the hassle of applying for a refund once you've become as frustrated as me and pick another test prep guide.

First off, I received a 800 Math and 590 Verbal on my GRE (still waiting for my writing scores), which is just fine as I'm going into Electrical Engineering.

Why did I buy this? I was looking for a cheap book that would give me some added practice beyond the free material provided by ETS.

Did it meet my low expectations of these sorts of books? Yes.

How low were my expectations? After buying books like these for the ACT, SAT, some subject tests, and now the GRE I've noticed that they universally have some degree of errors and have varying degrees of correlation with the actual exams themselves. Although annoying at times, the errors really are not that important because you find them easily when you supposedly have an answer wrong but after checking you realise THEY are in fact wrong, generally by only something absurd like an added zero. Who cares! This is supposed to be practice for timing yourself, picking up some test taking tips, and to learn what sorts of dumb mistakes you tend to make. This is NOT supposed to be a source to relearn algebra from scratch or fill out your daytime-television vocabulary. If you're just a little rusty you'll be fine. I found the recommendations generally useful throughout the sections. I can't speak for the writing section though since I only read the beginning to understand the proper perspective and focus to take on it.

The correlation between the practice in the book and with the actual exam wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. Make sure you take the ETS's REAL tests to calibrate your expectations and your studying. Overall I would recommend this to a friend.

This book is simply a waste of money, it is riddled with errors and conflicting advice. After a lot of irritation I finally found the CD will only run if I start my computer in safe mode, apparently it is designed for pre-vista computers! However the biggest problem is that I can spot blatant inaccuracies in the sections I am confident in, so simply cannot trust it with the sections I need help in. All around an inferior product.

I bought the 2009 version. With Windows 7 already announced and Windows Vista a few years old I found out that the companion CD is NOT compatible with ANY version of Windows Vista.

If you have a new computer do NOT get this book, the CD will be worthless to you and there is no way to get it to work that I can find.

I am absolutely horrified by the math errors in this book. It's as though not a single person went through to edit it. I don't even understand how they can get away with it.

There isn't much more to say. Almost every math review section has at least one error, which wastes your valuable time and is extremely frustrating. Kaplan, in their infinite generosity, give you 90 days to find these errors if you want to get a refund. Unfortunately, I didn't read the book soon enough to catch them and now I'm stuck with a $35 paperweight.

Buy any book except this one. Really.

I opened the book to the quantitative section today and almost immediately began wondering if there were typos in the book. I spent many frustrating minutes trying to figure out why the answers given were different from the answer I came up with, until I realized that sometimes the equal sign in the question was supposed to be a subtraction or addition sign, or something else. The reviews by other customers confirm my suspicions that, yes, this book is full of errors. Though these errors are slight, this sort of unprofessional garbage is what I expect of an undergraduate's midterm paper, not a publication from an esteemed test prep company--seeing as I don't have pay $20 to read the aforementioned midterm paper, nor is it supposed to help me prepare for the most important test I'll take this year.

The verbal section seems to be just fine, but don't bother buying this book if you need help with the math section.

I wish I had read the reviews BEFORE I bought this book. The math section has so many mistakes, it is really frustrating to try to use it to study. Im sure there are more mistakes than I even know, which makes me wonder if I am learning misinformation. The verbal section is fine, but I havent taken the test yet to see how applicable it is. Bottom Line - If you struggle with math, this book only makes it more confusing!!