GRE Test Prep and the Kaplan Program?

[furo]

Has anyone used the Kaplan program to prep for a GRE, and did it increase your scores?

I am entering grad school for engineering this Fall, but I want to transfer to an even better grad school after the first semester. I need to take the GRE, so I'm going to try and do pretty well on it, especially since I've been out of college since 2003

 

[imschatz]

My only issue with the the GRE was the timer. Any practice programs that offer scalable question difficulty and appropriate timers will help. I downloaded a few practice quantitative tests (only one I cared about) for $20 last fall. They seemed pretty square on in terms of what the actual test was like. I'll take a look at exactly what they are.

 

[ComboOrgan]

What do you mean by Kaplan program? The class or the book?

I haven't taken the class, but I have a good friend who took and and improved his scores by a non-trivial amount.

I used books (the big books by Kaplan and Princeton Review, and a couple voculabulary supplements) and did pretty well.

If you have trouble motivating yourself, the course is a good idea, since they will keep you on track

 

[the shah]

why would you study/practice for the GRE it was a joke of an exam

 

[JayJay]

I'd just use the practice exam made available by GRE because the main thing is to become acquainted with the types of items used on the exam. You already know what you know, so no prep exam is going to improve your knowledge.

 

[Pantisocrat]

I just bought the PR book and did quite well on the CAT format. This test is probably the easiest grad-entrance test you'll ever take.

 

[ComboOrgan]

To call the GRE easy is meaningless. It's neither easy nor hard. It's a measuring stick.
You might say that attaining a particlular score is easy, but that is relative.

 

[furo]

Originally Posted by ComboOrgan

To call the GRE easy is meaningless. It's neither easy nor hard. It's a measuring stick.
You might say that attaining a particlular score is easy, but that is relative.

+1

The test is adaptive so no matter how well you are doing the questions will only get harder and harder until you get one wrong. The idea is to get you alternating between one right answer and one wrong answer, since at that point, they have established what you can do and what you can't do.

So saying it's "easy" is not true.

Is it easy to score in a relatively high percentile range? Now that I don't know.

 

[the shah]

when you start at marsupial level, increasing difficulty doesn't mean much unless you have 30000 questions each one becoming exponentially more challenging. which isn't the case.

 

[furo]

Originally Posted by shahanshah

when you start at marsupial level, increasing difficulty doesn't mean much unless you have 30000 questions each one becoming exponentially more challenging. which isn't the case.

there's always one in every forum. apparently, that's you

 

[the shah]

had to fill the quota

not my fault if people are illiterate/innumerate