Reddit reviews Kaplan Gre Premier 2016: With 6 Practice Tests
We found 2 Reddit comments about Kaplan Gre Premier 2016: With 6 Practice Tests. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Brand New Book with DVD
These are the GRE books I'm using:
[Prep book from ETS, the test writers] (http://www.amazon.com/Official-Guide-Revised-General-Test/dp/007179123X?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00)
[Kaplan Prep book] (http://www.amazon.com/GRE-Premier-2016-Practice-Tests/dp/1625231326/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464258601&sr=1-1&keywords=kaplan+gre)
[Big book of practice problems] (http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Problems-Manhattan-Strategy-Guides/dp/1941234518?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=ox_sc_act_title_1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER)
ETS PowerPrep II, which is software that includes 2 practice tests with standard testing conditions.
If anyone has other suggestions, please share.
I don't see any concrete advice, so I'll advise of what I did to prepare. I started 4 months away from my test date because I was still a full time student the whole time preparing. Got a 159/167/5.0 and was pretty stoked with my verbal score. I started out in the low 140s/high 130s (words r hard) and had to work a lot to bring that up. For math, I just ran through two practice tests in the beginning and that was enough to brush up on the math stuff (the only things I forgot were statistics related).
Materials
Process
Writing: For this, I don't have much of a way of recommending how you prep. I have never been too great at writing itself, but you can learn a great deal from going through the book and googling extra essay prompts to organize your ideas. Organizing your ideas in an outline is imperative. Beyond that, the writing center at Tech might be worthwhile if you score below a 4.0 on your first test (it also depends what you're going to grad school for: I went into the medical field so writing is somewhat important, if you're going into engineering, you could pretty much get by with a 3.5 so long as the other scores are decent). Just work on organizing a good argument with brief but concrete examples. Read tons of example essays to figure out how to formulate your ideas.
Verbal: This is what I sucked at. My vocabulary has always been horrifically bad, and I got by forever with saying "I'm an engineer, I don't need this shit!" The Kaplan book has good lists in the back. I made flash cards for the most used words as well as word roots to figure out words on the fly. Go through the appendix and write down all you don't know, start with that.
Next, everytime you take a practice test, write down all of the words you didn't know on paper while you're taking the test, and make flash cards of those. I had a good 5-600 of word roots and words by the time I got done with a dozen practice tests and with how stupid the Kaplan book made me feel. Vocabulary is what got me the most, and is important for both the multiple choice as well as the reading comp. If you suck at reading comp. even after learning vocab, ask someone at the Writing Center for help. Reading/writing were never enough of a problem for me to seek out extra help, but I still wasn't great at them.
Math: Just run through practice tests. Write down any formulas you forget from math. If you're struggling with this, idk how to help because I can't explain math. You should be fine coming from Tech. I made like 50 flash cards of formulas to run through the week before the test (things like permutations vs combinations always tripped me up in the way they were worded).
TL;DR
Practice. A lot. If your grad school of choice is competitive or your GPA isn't the greatest, you should treat this like a class in itself over the next few months. It helps if you can budget the extra $200 to just take it now to get a feel for it and get a score to see where you need to improve. You must wear headphones and they give you a full pat down each time you go in and out of the computer room. The guy running my session was upwards of late 70s, and he stood behind me during half of the test.