AthenaQ

Yes, Kaplan's book was helpful, although I wasn't really fond of the way it was organized. The answers to the practice problems at the end of each topic covered were all placed at the end of the entire chapter; which may sound like a trite complaint, but it really got on my nerves when I was trying to check my work to see how I was doing. If I could have only used one book to study, I would have went with ARCO's. It wasn't as thourough, but it was organized better, and the section on QC problems really was amazingly helpful. Now playing: Melissa Etheridge - If I Wanted To via FoxyTunes

Actual GRE: V- 700 Q- 720 GRE Power Prep: V- 710 & 690 Q- 690 &640 Hello all. I would like to begin this post by stating that I only found these forums two days before I took the test, unfortunately. I really feel that I would have benefited from finding this haunt earlier, if for no other reason than the sense of community. I do not have any over-achieving friends to share my stress with. :( I'm fairly sure that I have been a huge bore to everyone I have came in contact with over the past few months, since all I was able to talk about was my impending GRE. I am very happy with my score, although I am somewhat surprised that I did as well as I did. I couldn't have asked for better AW topics, the boost of confidence gained during that section probably carried over into the rest of my test. I got a quantitative section first, which wasn't too bad. The study guides I used were great preparation; there were no problems that I looked at and thought "WTF?" My problem with the quantitative section is that it takes me awhile to complete the problems, especially word problems. However, I didn't get too bogged down on any one particular problem in this section. Next, a verbal section. There was only one word I was unsure of, which was in an analogy problem. The rest of the words I knew cold. I got one HORRIBLE reading comprehension passage. Something about the origin of African-American poetry as opposed to European-American poetry. By this time, the testing room was really warm, and I needed to use the restroom. I really could not make heads or tails of what the passage was trying to say, and there were four questions relating to the passage. Either way, it left a bad taste in my mouth, although I finished the rest of the verbal section with no problem. Then! I got another quantitative section. By this time, I was REALLY aggravated, hot, and just wanted to be done. I am not sure whether or not this was the experimental or actual quantitative section... All I know is that some of the questions were INSANE. I would get some algebra based question that I had NO clue about, and be forced to make an educated guess or else spend at least five minutes trying to figure it out. Then, I would get a REALLY easy geometry or statistics based question. At the end of this section, I got one of those questions where you typed your answer into the box. Here are the study materials I used: Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Builder (very useful for etomology) Kaplan's GRE Verbal Workbook (very useful in bulking up on vocabulary words) Princeton Review 5000 Ivy League Vocabulary Words (a word list, a lot of overlap with Kaplan's GRE Verbal Workbook) Kaplan's GRE & GMAT Math Workbook (good overall math review) ARCO's GRE/GMAT Math Review (the review and hints on the quantitative comparison problems in this book were EXTREMELY useful, I attribute a lot of my quantitative score to 15 pages in this book) If anyone has any questions, feel free to PM me. Good luck to everyone! I am so proud of my own success, as well as everyone else's on this forum. I don't think people realize that this IS a test you can study for, thus selling themselves short on test day. I really wish I had ran across this forum earlier. ---------------- Now playing: Ben Harper - Brown Eyed Blues via FoxyTunes