Reddit reviews Conquering the Physics GRE

Unfortunately, you'll have to take the physics GRE and brush up on the topics you aren't familiar with, at least enough to answer the basic types of questions that show up on the exam. I recommend the Conquering the Physics GRE book.

I ended up with a 24%ile score and still managed to get into four great programs.

I highly recommend Conquering the Physics GRE by Kahn and Anderson. It covers each topic in the exam in detail, and goes over every possible topic in each category that could be asked, and has three practice exams with solutions in it, as well as practice problems in each chapter. The authors also detail the composition of the exam, and each chapter is sized to how big it is on the exam (i.e. it's about 20% classical mechanics, so that section is huge, vs special relativity is about 6% so that's much smaller.) I've been studying out of this book for over a year, and I've learned a lot about both topics I learned in undergrad as well as stuff I never went over (such as, I never took QM, but I'm slowly progressing :) )

You can email this group as Case Western University and they'll send you flashcards for the exam.

This site provides a study plan for the exam, and the [University of Washington(https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/physicsgre/home) has a much more detailed version, though it might be a bit late to follow these.

Lately I've been using this website intensely to study. It gives the solutions to every problem for four practice exams release by ETS. Some of them are much older, but the problems today are similar, and fortunately a lot of undergrad physics topics are 100+ years old so it isn't outdated!

edit: this is no longer the case Also, you should know that the exam penalizes you for guessing. You get +1 point for correct answer, -0.25 for incorrect, and +0 for skipped questions. So if you're not highly confident about which answer is correct, you may be better of skipping.

I am using Conquering the Physics GRE as an overview, but I really enjoy anything from David Morin and David J. Griffiths for the level of questions and explanations (and in-book/online solutions manuals that go a long way towards showing you how to think like a physicist). But my "library" for preparing for the physics GRE is:

CM: Morin, Problems and Solutions in Introductory Mechanics and Introduction to Classical Mechanics

Gregory, Classical Mechanics for extra explanations and problems

EM: Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics 3e

QM: Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics 3e

Thermo/Stat.Mech: Schroeder, An Introduction to Thermal Physics

Kittel and Kroemer, Thermal Physics

Waves: Morin, on his website are ten chapters to what appears to be a Waves book in the making

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/waves/

Atomic, Lab Methods: Conquering the Physics GRE and any online resources I can find.

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If you email Case Western, they send a link to some amazing flash cards!