Once upon a time there was a recent college graduate, named Rachel. As much as she enjoyed not having papers to write and tests to study for… she was thinking it was about time to go back to school. In her town it was not easy to find a job with just a bachelor’s degree. Many places of employment were looking for people with either a whole lot of experience or a high level of education. It was becoming more common to go “back to school”. Many of her friends were returning to school, whether it was for business, law, or medicine. So, she decided to go with the flow – jump off the cliff with her friends.

GRE? What’s that?
She looked into graduate schools. Most graduate schools required her to take a test (like how one takes the SATs for college) in order for them to decide if she would be an asset to their school. One of the common tests is the GRE, mostly used for students wishing to study liberal arts. The GRE contains three sections: quantitative, analytical, and verbal.

The dreaded practice test
Rachel took a practice test during college and did horribly. She was pretty devastated and decided she would need to take some sort of action if she really did want to go to graduate school. She looked into prep classes and they were ridiculously expensive. Being the frugal (GRE vocab word) recent grad that she was, she decided to try the cheaper route and buy a book. What a good idea!

Light at the end of the tunnel
After doing a little bit of research Rachel decided to buy Gre Exam, by Kaplan. Included with the book is a CD-Rom. The book contained a lot of tips and tricks as well as practice tests, but she found the CD more helpful.

The CD not only has review lessons, but it also includes games, practice tests, and vocabulary flash cards. There are many review lessons within each category. Each lesson gives tips to help save time, and practice drills to make sure you really absorbed the information. There are games to learn and practice vocabulary, antonyms, sentence completion, and math concepts. The games were unbelievably fun (well, slight exaggeration), but what Rachel really liked is that when she missed a word it would save it for her so that she could practice it again later. The vocabulary flash cards are pretty cool as well. This section is very well organized. On one side there is the word, and on the other is the definition and an example sentence. Rachel was able to select and save certain words that she was having problems with.

Starting the CD
The only complaint she had is that when the CD installs it says it is installing the latest version of Quicktime. She already had it on her computer and does not think it looks to see if you already have it. That was kind of annoying and time consuming for her.

So, when she finally got the program installed there was a very informative start-up routine. A man and a woman came on the screen and told her a little about how the CD works and about the GRE test.

Then, Rachel took a diagnostic GRE test. This is very similar to the actual test. It looks exactly the same and there is a time constraint. After taking the test with all three sections she got a very detailed overview including her final score, data on changing answers, and how she did within each of the sections. This was a great way for her to find out what she needed to work on. They also allowed her to go back over the test, see what she got wrong, and then they give a very detailed explanation of how she would solve the problem or find the answer. After taking the test a “road map plan” was organized for her including all the sections she needed to focus on.

Does it really work?
Now, Rachel has not taken the actual GRE test yet. She still has more practice and studying to do, but she can really see an improvement on her scores on the practice tests. It is amazing. So far, she has total confidence in this book/CD.

When Rachel takes the test she will let y’all know how she did and her final thoughts of the GRE prep book.


Recommended: Yes