Kaplan GRE Psychology, Third Edition (Kaplan Gre Psychology)

I studied very hard for well over a month through this book and took the test today. Now I don't know my score yet or anything, but my general impression is that this book is not at all representative of the GRE Psyc exam. The Kaplan book only covered less than 50% of what was on the actual exam. I had to rely mostly on logic, reasoning, and what I had picked up from classes and my own studies to do a lot of the test. The Kaplan book did not at all cover I/O psychology or many famous experiments or facts that were on the test.

Also, the Psyc GRE was much more application based than the book portrayed. There are no "Definition given - What is this called?" questions. I blew through the practice tests in just over an hour for the most part and did well, but took over 2 hours today and did not have time to check my test again. I haven't looked at the other books out, but I would highly suggest looking into other books or at least supplementing your study with something else.

Words cannot describe how useless this book was to me and my frustrations for using it to study for 50+ hours only to see that so much of what i studied, wasn't on the test and what wasn't in this book was. By using this book, i totally blew my attempt to increase my score on a second round of testing.

Also, typos abound in every chapter (e.g. "by" supposed to be "be," "see" meaning "is," etc.) This book felt like 8 different authors crudely compiled chapters according to what they felt like discussing.

Shoddy research. Poorly edited. Questionable content. This book is absolute marketing BS.

Agreed with the previous reviewer re: the manifest typos and grammatical problems in this book. Granted, it's not a review for the English subject test, but one or two passes by a proof reader wouldn't have hurt anybody. It's a little hard to trust that you're getting good preparation for any test from a book that is so poorly written and edited.

As far as the usefulness of the book is concerned, I would give it a higher grade than others. I scored in the 60th percentile on my initial practice test, and after going through this guide (and reviewing my intro psych text) was in the 90s on the actual test. I hadn't encountered much of the material in this book since my intro class 6 years ago, and I actually thought that most of the big names and key experiments from the history of psychology were in here. That being said, one should definitely only use it as a supplement to other review materials; the best way to prepare for this test is still just to thoroughly flip...Read more