joannestudy

There's a website best GRE prep book that "benchmarks" lots of GRE preparation materials. It collects students' GRE score and the preparation materials they used and tell you which preparation materials are the most effective based on the data they collected.(good size) No sales material and no advertisement on their site. Hope it helps!

If you want to get more involved in politics and international relationship, go with Princeton. If you want to focus on engineering, MIT is the obvious choice. Having said that, check and see if there's any joint program by MIT and Harvard. If there's something at Harvard that a MIT student can attend, then you might be able to get the best of both worlds. Harvard also has excellent political science / international relationship and general social science department.

When all things being equal, quant score could decide financial aid, but if you have other strong credential that matter more, then you should be fine.

There are many Indians and not everyone buys grades. In fact, India has produced some of the brightest students in the world. We just need a system to better verify the credential. Btw the practice of "buying grades" happen in lots of the Asian countries where competition is though and people want to get out, not just India.