Did anyone else find both the PR and Kaplan books to be significantly harder than the actual exam?

[InquilineKea]

There are some problems in them that are a lot more difficult than any problem I saw in the GRE (I got 166 V/167 M by the way)

[pinkrobot]

This is always the case, for every standardized test.

My hunch is that it has something to do with selling more books ("Oh no! I tanked the diagnostic! I should buy Company X's companion books for math, vocabulary, pandas, time travel . . . "), coming hand-in-hand with the kinds of slogans they use ("Take control of your future!").

As a tutor, though, I remind my tutees that this is one case where it is not hard to see the silver lining to a manifestation of greed: if you are prepared for the test in the preparatory books, you are most likely good to go for the actual test. This does not apply, however, to the Literature GRE, where often the tests in the prep books are not only harder but in fact entirely off base (in my experience, for the Lit. GRE the things that makes the prep books' tests more difficult are inaccuracies and incredibly vague wording--I'm looking at you, Barron's--which do not help prepare for the real deal; this of course does not affect you, but I've had that vent stored in me for months!).

(Ed. for typos.)

Edited December 11, 2011 by pinkrobot

[coonskee]

I definitely agree with that - also, for me, the practice tests I took (powerprep and kaplan) were a lot harder than what I actually saw on the GRE. I memorized about 200 new words in a week before my GRE and do you know how many of those I needed on the lit section? One.

I'm still positive the reason I did "poorly" on the quant section (161, which isn't awful, but I was expecting 165+ from my performance on practice tests / the fact I'm good at math) is because the two sections I got following my first quant (one obviously being experimental) were so much easier than anything I'd had in practice tests before that I was freaking out the entire time that I had done awfully. I definitely got distracted because of that... I'm still upset with myself for it.

For those still to take the test: don't let yourself freak out like I did! Sigh.