Barron's GRE: Graduate Record Examination

Comment: Product was quickly shipped to me and in excellent condition. No used pages or written notes anywhere.

Comment: Barron's 18th Edition for the GRE will likely help you prepare for the exam better than sitting at home watching paint dry or maybe reading Kaplan's version. This book is poorly edited, mistakes abound and are frustrating to the observant reader, and the format of the examples are not always intuitive. I have noticed errors in several sections, and it has irked me enough that I have stopped studying to write a scathing review. For example, the word definition for "colloquy" in their word list is "informal discussion," when it "informal" should be "formal." The only usage of colloquy in which it would be informal would be related to theological discussions. Another instance of frustrating mistakes is in some of their examples, they simply omit what the correct answer is. On one of their graphic interpretation practice questions, the question is reversed: instead of asking how much less, the question asks for how much more. Only in the answer section do you realize that the author/editor made an oversight, rather than your inability to answer the question.

I will mention again that this book will help you in your preparations for the GRE and possibly more so than Kaplan (in my opinion, which they simply have wrong answers). But that is like saying the urinal smells better than the toilet. However, these books are simply too poorly put together and little care was taken to refine these prep books. I only gave this book 2 stars (vs. 1 star), because I believe it to be marginally better than Kaplan in terms of quality. That is to say, Barron's GRE book is slightly less crappy. The other reason is its "Master Word List" which contains 3500 vocabulary words used commonly. This may be the one redeeming quality of this book, providing mostly accurate definitions with the words used in context on a large volume of vocab words.

Conclusion: This book is not good, but not as bad as comparable products out there. I have not tried Princeton Review products in detail, but they are generally more expensive with essentially the same content. One redeeming quality of Barron's is its word list. If you do purchase this book, buy it for this vocab list. Better yet, if your local library has a copy of these books, borrow it from there.

Update:
Took the GRE again, Verbal score went up 90 points, Quantitative score had no improvement.

Comment: Page 229 problem #24 math error 5050-1275=3775 not 3875.
Page 247 problem #18,wording "least", does make a differance.

There are other alledged mistakes in math, either with the answers or the actual question asked that gives you the answer. Went to the book store where we bought it and the lady said she heard others say the same.

Comment: The vocabulary in this book was fantastic. All the words I saw on the actual test I remembered seeing in the book. The only trouble was I didn't remember some of the definitions. Totally my fault, by the way. Great intuitive book. The Math section was pretty well written. A lot of the strategies in there I was already using, but they were great to review and see expressed in words.

I'm a computer science major and my verbal score was over 600 so I'm happy. This book definitely helped verbally, but I can't really say anything about the math, because I really didn't use or need that section.

But this is a good buy for anyone who is taking the exam. Too bad they don't really have a way to qualitatively assess essay scores. The advice they give for that section, though, is helpful.

Comment: This is a great book for practicing the GRE. I was impressed by the verbal section and although the Maths section was a bit confusing, I got hold of it in the end. Great purchase!