Kaplan Gre Courses

[smartypants14]

I was thinking of enrolling into one of the GRE prep courses through kaplan, I have heard they are worth the money. Has anyone enrolled in the courses and what was your outcome?

Thanks!

[Guest |||]

When I wrote the GRE, a friend of mine took the course and I did not.  I would guess we were roughly on equal footing, and on exam date, we had very comparable scores.

 

Obviously its a personal case, though it will largely depend on what is most comfortable and practical for you.  I like to study alone, my friend likes to study with others.  Neither of us really needed to learn new material (aside memorizing words), so it wasn't as huge a leap going over the quantative or essay writing.  This may or may not be different for you, however, for whatever are your strengths or weaknesses a course will go over everything.  This is both good as it gives a thorough review, but also not ideal for everyone - some students need more focus on math, some on verbal, some have programs that emphasize high scores in one and not the other.  Cost is also another factor to consider, the courses are significantly more pricey than just grabbing a couple books and using the internet.

 

So in short, I would say consider

 

How you like to study, what you need to focus on, what your program wants and cost.

[zapster]

What sort of preparation / background do you have - have you taken a mock test, and if so what are your scores. Unless your scores are really very low, I would recommend self-study combined with as many practice tests as you can take as the best possible option. There are plenty of full tests that accompany some of the standard GRE books, some free tests available online + some paid prep tests (e.g. Manhattan) which are really good.

[Brent@GreenlightGRE]

I agree with zapster. Take a practice test (either from the Official Guide to the GRE book or from the free downloadable software at http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/powerprep2/download)

This will give you an idea of how much prep you'll need. It's even possible that you can achieve your target score without any prep. 

 

As for the best learning materials, I think most of the materials out there are decent. It really depends on your learning style.  Some people need the classroom, others prefer self-guided options. There's also a motivational component. For some, a weekly classroom course is required to force them to study. Others manage perfectly well studying on their own.

 

Cheers,

Brent

[lhommependu]

I used the Barron's GRE course to prepare and nothing else besides the ETS Powerprep, Painless GRE app for Android (shout out to Philip Nguyen, i'll remember the word "aberrant" for the rest of my life), and Google and came out with 90th percentiles across the board. Also when I did it Barron's was like 60 bucks compared to Kaplan's 500 (i think it's up to 100 now but that's still a way better deal).

 

I ran into a dude from my lab on the day of the test who had spent 4 months with Kaplan vs my month with Barron's and I think we both performed pretty similarly compared to our initial diagnostics (like +6 points between V and Q). So yeah basically what I'm getting at is I think a lot of these courses are a bit overkill.

 

One cute thing about Barron's (that the other courses may do too, i'm not certain) is it pretty explicitly says "a lot of these standardized tests aren't really that great at measuring how smart you are, but how good you are at taking that particular test, so we're gonna teach how to take the GRE". like it teaches you about the "kinds of wrong answers" that ETS likes to use that you'll come across in verbal, as well as strategies for narrowing down your quant answers.

 

Barron's if you're reading this and wanna talk sponsorship, get at me in PM