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Description
Comprehensive Prep for GRE Math.
Every year, students pay $1,000 and more to test prep companies to prepare for the math section of the GRE. Now you can get the same preparation in a book.
Although the GRE math section is difficult, it is very learnable. GRE Math Prep Course presents a thorough analysis of GRE math and introduces numerous analytic techniques that will help you immensely, not only on the GRE but in graduate school as well.
Features:
Comprehensive Review: Twenty-three chapters provide the most thorough review of GRE math available.
Practice: Includes 164 examples and more than 600 exercises! Arranged from easy to medium to hard to very hard.
Diagnostic Test: The diagnostic test measures your strengths and weaknesses and directs you to areas you need to study more.
Duals: These are pairs of similar problems in which only one property is different. They illustrate the process of creating GRE questions.
If your target is a 700+ score, this is the book!
Please note that some students preparing for the GMAT have been buying the GRE Math Prep Course. We are pleased to announce that we publish two books expressly for the GMAT math section: GMAT Math Prep Course and GMAT Data Sufficiency Prep Course, both available here at Amazon.
Product Details
Author:
Jeff Kolby
Perfect Paperback:
528 pages
Publisher:
Nova Press
Publication Date:
September 01, 2011
Language:
English
ISBN:
1889057592
Product Length:
10.76 inches
Product Width:
8.56 inches
Product Height:
1.31 inches
Product Weight:
2.56 pounds
Package Length:
10.6 inches
Package Width:
8.4 inches
Package Height:
1.1 inches
Package Weight:
2.6 pounds
Average Customer Rating:
based on 49 reviews
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review: ( 49 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
117 of 122 found the following review helpful:
A GRE Book that won't have you cursing obscenities Sep 08, 2010
By real san diego reader This is the first GRE book that didn't infuriate me. Many other books are full of down-right stupid questions that are only difficult because they involve a great deal of tedious arithmetic (the average of the eight numbers in column A vs. the average of the nine numbers in column B). I've come across a book that assumed that I remember a bunch of unit conversions (how many feet in a mile, cups in a gallon), and one nasty book in particular (now out of print) that kept switching back and forth between integers and real numbers without specifying which set is being used. Still other books describe a bunch of "strategies" that are ridiculously time consuming and cannot be used realistically on the actual exam. Thankfully, this book had none of the faults I've just described. While there are some errors, they weren't as numerous as they are in most other GRE books.
The book is split up into over two dozen chapters, each chapter dealing with a specific type of problem such as geometry, substitution, and exponents & roots. This allows you to focus on each problem type, one at a time, so that you can be sure you have thoroughly mastered it. Personally, I think this approach is much more beneficial than learning some general strategies for solving what are, essentially, very different types of problems. Another great feature is that the book categorizes each problem by the level of difficulty (Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard). The problems labeled "Very Hard" are intended to be more difficult than any problem found on the GRE, and solving them is a great confidence booster.
I have a stack of GRE books including ones by Kaplan and Princeton Review, and this is by far the best GRE Math book I've come across. Highly recommended.
Update: I just took the GRE for the first time and scored a 1580 (800 math, 780 verbal). While I used many different books to prepare, this was the main one for the math section. If you want my advice, start with this book. Do every problem. Do not skim. Make sure you buy this book (GRE Math Prep Course) and not Nova's general GRE Prep book because the general GRE book does not cover everything that is covered in this one. Once you finish this book, you can use other books as supplementary material. I recommend the Barron's book because it has a lot of deceptive, tricky questions, and it's useful to learn how to spot those gotchas. Finally, be wary of free, "diagnostic tests" offered by companies. I took Kaplan's Free online practice exam two nights before the actual GRE and scored a 1340 (690 math, 650 verbal). By far, the most accurate practice exam I took was the ETS powerprep (free download) which gave me a 1560 (800 math, 760 verbal) the night before I took the real exam.
34 of 34 found the following review helpful:
Extensive Math Review But Missing Some Key Points Dec 06, 2010
By Finite NY I bought this book as one of my final purchases for my GRE prep. It had been very highly rated and I needed a more intensive math review after purchasing GRE for Dummies, Cracking the GRE by Princeton and the Barrons 800 High Frequency Word List. The fact that the book separates the question levels of difficult is one of the better aspects of the book. The sheer number of questions to practice with is also very helpful.
However, there are still numerous flaws that left me unsatisfied. I found the reviews of many concepts to be lackluster at best, giving questions in the medium or hard sections with no preemptive preparation in the review part of the section. Also, I found numerous questions to be tediously full of problems that need more time to work on than should be necessary for a GRE question. Also, I found the types of questions themselves, while helpful to concept practice, not at all written in the same manner as the GRE questions you can typically find in the PowerPrep or in a Princeton book.
The math section on the GRE is all about tricks, traps and simple ways to solve problems. Many solutions offered in the answer sections provide complex if not completely unnecessary solutions - adding extra variables where no variable really need be added, for example. They show complex ways of solving QC problems with a D answer that need only basic logic to prove as a D.
Lastly, I feel a math book for the GRE should be teaching you how to do the least amount of math in your 45 minutes and how to immediately spot a trap. This book only minimally mentions traps and tips to find them.
16 of 18 found the following review helpful:
Thank goodness I found this book!! Aug 22, 2010
By Jaime Mae This book is amazing!!! I wouldnt have done well without it. I studied with Kaplan's math workbook And Kaplan is good, but it is pitiful compared to this one. This book covers way more things that ARE on the Gre that Kaplan did not. Also, it levels the questions so that you know what level question you are answering.. which is extremely helpful because you get a better look at the ballpark of questions you will be asked on the GRE. I am so thankful that I found this book... it was tremendously helpful!
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Valuable prep, but insufficient by itself Mar 01, 2011
By Another reader This book is definitely not perfect; it is long and unwieldy and it doesn't focus enough on strategies for quickly brute-forcing your way through questions using logic and knowledge of basic math rules. That said, I am incredibly glad I bought it. I credit this book with giving me the tools to improve my GRE math score by more than 150 points. This book gives you an amazingly solid grounding in the basics,(although you have to be willing to commit a lot of time to studying it), after which you will be well-prepared to reason your way through some of the GRE questions that demand a more quick-thinking approach. Also, to be honest, I feel my many hours spent on this book just made me better at math in general. In response to the poster below who felt that the book sprang practice questions on the reader without providing adequate preparation in the math review section, in fact the question explanations were some of the most valuable learning tools in the book. It is much easier to understand how to do a problem by doing it, failing, reading the explanation, and trying again, than by simply reading a blurb.
Again, there are definite drawbacks to this book. Little to no review of basic operations (I had to re-learn how to divide decimals on my own!)and an insufficient discussion of strategy. Also, there are certain math questions on the test that come up again and again and are very easy to miss unless you know the 'trick,' and this book was by and large not good at warning you how to do them.
I would suggest, in order, working through the free online "Sparknotes" guide to GRE math, then quickly skimming through the Princeton Review guide to the GRE, then doing this book, then doing practice tests and referring back to this book to understand any questions you miss on practice tests. Of course, most people will not be starting from such a terrible math background as I had, but this rather lengthy process worked well for me.
9 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Found this book obtuse with large errors present Oct 26, 2010
By Michelle C. Dunlap I bought this book because it was so highly reviewed by others. I was not a math major in my undergraduate career and have been out of college for 3 years. This means the last time I had truly comprehensive math instruction was in high school. Thankfully, I have retained most of what I learned in high school to the point that I am able to tutor SAT math for current high school students. I bought this book hoping it would strengthen my skills in areas I was weak in and give me enough instruction to work with skills I was never taught, such as ratios, and chords, tangents, and such with circles. (My high school math courses never completed their curricula by the end of the year, meaning there are holes in my mathematical knowledge.) I have been highly disappointed. I do not believe this book will help me increase my score in the GRE.
After carefully reviewing each section and solving the example problems, then verifying the answers with their written explanations, I turned to the question sets. I became more and more frustrated as I moved through. The instruction and examples did not prepare me for some of the types of questions asked in the sets. Some questions were poorly worded. More often, the solutions at the end of the sets used what seemed to me to be the most obtuse logic possible to reach the results. I found these solutions to be very difficult and not at all suitable for the tight time on the GRE math section. I ended up asking my friends who are math teachers for simpler solutions to these problems that I could understand and remember. Very frustrating for someone who is able to tutor SAT math confidently.
The final straw came in the middle of the graph section. While reviewing my answers, I noticed that question 11 in the problem set and question 11 in the solution for the set were entirely different. As in, the question I was asked was "In what year was the exam least difficult?" (according to the graph's data). The solution I was given was for "Which exam was the second most difficult?" This simple, but major mistake on the writer's part has now made me suspect the accuracy of the book as a whole. For that reason as well as the obtuse logic used in several problems, I can not recommend this book to anyone who feels that they have definite math weaknesses. I am highly disappointed in it, given the high reviews I read from other parties.
based on 49 reviews
A GRE Book that won't have you cursing obscenities Sep 08, 2010
By real san diego reader
Extensive Math Review But Missing Some Key Points Dec 06, 2010
By Finite NY
Found this book obtuse with large errors present Oct 26, 2010
By Michelle C. Dunlap
