The Official Guide to the GRE Revised General Test, 2nd Edition 2nd Edition

This book is compiled by ETS, the makers of the GRE test. It contains original GRE questions, i.e. questions that have appeared in the GRE test. While it is a must have book for all GRE test takers here are a few pointer that could help you get the best of it.*** PROS ***1. Original GRE Questions: All the questions in here are questions that have appeared in the GRE test. This becomes particularly significant in the Chapters “Verbal Reasoning” and “Quantitative Reasoning”. The strategies described in these chapters are very useful and relevant in the GRE test.2. Chapters on AWA Sections: This book is, by far, the best guide for AWA section available in the market. It has a collection of sample essays and it explains in great detail how to score well in the AWA section.3. Verbal and Quantitative reasoning practice Questions: Each section is prefaced by detailed theoretical discussions that cover the entire topic in great detail. There are quite a few solved examples in each topic. The solutions discussed in this chapter are meticulously detailed.4. Classification of Questions: The questions in the practice chapters are classified as Easy, Medium and Hard Questions. It provides an additional frame of reference for the test takers.5. Practice tests: The book has two paper tests and two tests on the CD ROM. There is a solution section after each paper test and there is a set of sample solutions to Essay questions. The CD ROM test can also be downloaded from the website as the PowerPrep II software.*** CONS ***1. Number of questions in the book is quite low when compared to similar books by other publishers. If you need material for practice you probably have to invest in another book.2. It is not the most beginner-friendly book. The book assumes that you have polished your basic concepts, specially in the Quants section, before going thorugh it3. While the PowerPrep tests are most accurate test available in the market their result analysis tool is quite inadequate. It does not have the SWOT analysis capabilities comparable to that of the Princeton or Kaplan Tests.This is the perfect book with which you can polish your GRE Prep. The fact that it has original GRE questions alone is a powerful reason to buy it. You need to train your ear, esp. with the verbal questions. Further, the Chapter on Quant and Verbal Practice Question and the Chapter on the AWA section would add significant value to your preparation.*** Some Frequently Asked Questions:What are some of the other study options that I have?Students in the past who have felt the need that they require training from a basic level have started off their test prep with Kaplan or Barron’s books and topped them off with ETS GRE Guide. You might want to consider Manhattan for your initial preparation as well. Manhattan GRE Set of eight strategy guides come with 8 books that target specific math and verbal areas. However they require 2-3 months to complete. If you need more original GRE Questions you can buy the Official GRE Quantitative and or Verbal Reasoning books.*** What is a good study plan using ETS GRE Guide?I would recommend that you could start with Manhattan/Kaplan and finish it within couple of months, then evaluate which are your areas of strength/ weakness. Based on your analysis you can invest in this book by ETS to bolster your weaknesses.*** Will this get me to 320+?This book alone, won’t get you to 320+ score – it is just a collection of questions with some rough rules. You should consider investing in a guide book that can refresh your quant and verbal skills. Good options are Kaplan or Manhattan books to start with and then the ETS guide would prove to be useful in the last leg of your test prep.*** Other Books I should know about?The Manhattan GRE series are a great and very comprehensive collection as well as the Official GRE Verbal and Quant books. You can also use Kaplan Premiere if you don't have the time or money for the Manhattan GRE (MGRE) series)Best of luck with your test prep.Sandy, GRE: 323PS: I reply to comments on Amazon.

I bought this book three weeks ago and took the GRE today. I've read complaints that it assumes that you have already learned the math. This is probably true. The GRE is for college graduates and the quantitative reasoning portion tests pretty much everything that any student should have learned in high school. The GRE does not cover trig or calculus. It is not reasonable to expect a 563 page book to actually teach all of the math courses taught in high school. But, assuming that you did take algebra, geometry, and some basic probability; chapter seven is an excellent refresher to bring you up to speed quickly. The chapters on analytical writing are great at showing you what the ETS readers will be looking for. The reviewer that said that there are no explanations for the answers to the practice exams apparently did not look at the 78 pages that followed the answer key. Unlike the Barron's book, the ETS not only explains the correct answer, but also explains why the other distractors are incorrect. I thought the explanations were quite thorough and very helpful. I agree that the computer based version of the test did not provide feedback (if it did, I didn't know where to find it) but I took them after doing the paper tests. These turned out to be EXACTLY like the actual test, and I thought that they were great practice. The grades furnished by the paper and computer-based practice exams were very close to the unofficial scores I received at the end of the actual test. I am quite pleased with this book and the results it helped me achieve.

As you likely know from either the title or familiarity with the ETS, this book is the Official Guide for the GRE General Test (Revised). I teach the GRE full-time and this is one of two books I require my students to purchase for two primary reasons. This is the only book made by the test-makers, so there is an extraordinarily amount of useful information here: the questions are phrased in the way that the real test phrases them, the content is fairly reflective of the real exam, and the book itself now comes with 2 paper-based and 2 computer-based versions of the test. So, in total, there are hundreds of questions to try your hand at. Secondly, each question comes with a very lengthy explanation as to why certain answers are right and often enough, why other answers are wrong.The ETS is also kind enough to identify which questions are of what difficulty level, so you can even mark your own progress fairly well, too.The book further comes with examples of responses to the Analytical Writing tasks, so you have a very good sense of what the ETS thinks of as "a good essay" and "a bad essay", as well.The book is, however, fairly lacking on a number of other counts. It is not particularly useful as a stand-alone text and once you've exhausted the questions in the book, there are no other resources to use outside of it from the ETS. Additionally--and most importantly--the book lacks a functionally useful set of questions to really build on basic mathematics skills and takes for granted that test-takers will be able to perform particular operations.My biggest gripe about the book is it's Quantitative Review (Pages 207-305), in which there are no explanations for sample problems and often, concepts are covered in ways that are actually almost unusable for the test itself. Bizarrely, in spite of the fact that the test consistently features Special Right Triangles (Pythagorean Triplets) and often requires test-takers to simplify radicals, the book makes no mention of either of these basic math concepts. These are two among many others.Additionally, the test does not often inform students of the most efficient or effective way of working through a problem. They'll give a very accurate description of how to solve math problems in some cases, but not if it's optimal for ideal test-taking. As a prime example, there are right triangle questions featured on almost every version of the GRE and almost all of the right triangles featured have particular properties to them. But, the GRE Guide makes no mention of these properties and test-takers are left to their own devices to either figure them out or work around them in the most inefficient ways.The book is a sort of oddity, as such: it purports to be the Official Guide of the test but it also seems purposefully left incomplete, as if the test-makers wanted to provide some help in making the test accessible, but not so much help that anyone could effectively study for it using their own materials. The cynical conclusion one might draw from this is that the ETS is heavily invested in maintaining the secrecy and mysteriousness of the test (and is also invested in test-takers re-testing) but they don't want the test to seem unduly unfair.To improve this product, they should include more practice sets that are divided up by concept (rather than simply by difficulty) and further, they should revamp the math review, which has not changed since the good ole' days of the original GRE Guide (which was originally published over 20 years ago).