Best Online Prep Course? (Kap vs Barron's vs TPR)

[mutantmanifesto]

Just to get it out of the way: I need a course. I know this as fact.

 

Ok, so, I work fulltime and absolutely have no way to take an in-person or live-online course. I need a go-at-your-own-speed online course. Kaplan, Barron's and The Princeton Review all have courses.

 

Kaplan is $500, but you can pay in 3 installments (awesome for me). 7 practice tests. By the looks of it, you get some books to study with as well.

 

Barron's is $100 and has a nice ipad app to go along with it. 4 practice tests.

 

The Princeton Review is $500 in one go. 8 practice tests.

 

Anybody have experience with any of these? I'd lean towards Barron's, but...well, in general you get what you pay for. I'm looking for the best bang for my buck, really. I need to bump my score, but, oh, double.

[Arezoo]

try Magoosh. It's only $99 and covers all the sections with tons of video lessons and practice questions. I bet you won't regret it.<br />https://gre.magoosh.com

[meaningless]

hello mutantmanifesto, i am currently using barron's online prep, they are on sale at $69 so i think this is of great favorite of you. however, i have to say if i can choose again i think i will go for magoosh.

 

first of all the barron's prep you cannot customize your practice, that means you can only go for verbal practice but you have no say on which type of questions you are going to take. as i have been doing quite ok on TC and SE, they gave me less than 5% of TC and SE in my practice sets. what i am working so far, for over 20 practice question set, are almost ALL RC - where I really am exhausted in reading over and over again for the LONG passages - over 500 words with poor word alignment. 

 

second, the maths are too easy that i get all correct in so far six set of question. where in my 1st run of GRE i get 160Q and this time i aimed at getting a perfect on that. so this is not really helpful to me.

 

thirdly, some of the explanation of the answer has not yet completed (some even with only a "D" and then nohting - absolutely nothing), and few of the answers are just obviously wrong. 

 

for the good deals, it is really a huge Q bank for $69, over 1000 questions available with 4 practice tests. also after the torment of the RC marathon, it is quite irrefutable that my V improved both in pace and accuracy. the correct % and the clock is also a good tools for self-evaluation. 

 

i tried the demo on magoosh. the maths are useful to me - that i feel the format is at least a bit correlation with the real GRE. also they have a reputation of harder maths questions. it is good to reinforce the basic and concept, but i think it is not useful to maths people that score low in Q because of careless mistake. their verbal part is also quite good as well. the question is good written, logical and not vague.

 

i didn't try kaplan yet, for princeton review i only tried their free online test. the program is crappy that my browser get a few crashes before i can run the test. nevertheless the prediction of the score is similar to barron's one, and they do have tutor to review you assay.

[DonovanMS]

I agree. EMPOWER GRE rocks! I'm a big fan. I just responded to another post about it too here:

 

 

It's actually more comprehensive than the Kaplan course my girlfriends best friend spent over $1000 on, but about 90% less. 

 

I think you'll also appreciate the free Magoosh flash card app too in addition to the EMPOWER GRE system.

 

I'd say good luck, but I don't think you'll need it. 

[manutdftw]

Hey there,  I agree with Arezoo. Magoosh is pretty awesome. I got the $99 web access for 6 months in December and it's been great so far. All the videos are thorough and there's a practice section where you can practice GRE questions (there are about 600 for each section) with a built-in timer. The explanations to the answers are very clear and concise (they have both video and text explanations). The questions you get wrong are marked and you can go back and just practice the incorrect questions later on. 

 

Of course just with everything else, there are some negatives. Some of the math videos start from the really basic info and move up in terms of complexity. But they are very helpful if you're a beginner and you can skip videos based on your level. Also, I wish they had a writing assessment section where they would grade your essays but maybe that's too much to ask for $99. 

 

I think the best thing about Magoosh is the price. For $99 (they say it's on sale but I haven't seen the price change in the last 10 months) it's a great deal compared to Kaplon, Barron, etc. I've been doubling that with Manhattan Prep 5lbs book (you can get it online for free if you know where to look ahem ahem) and free vocab tools (Quizlet, apps, other vocab lists). I haven't taken the GREs yet but can already see a huge difference in my timed practice sections.

 

It someone's interested in buying Magoosh, help a brother out http://gre.magoosh.com/invite/VR6H3X so I can get a $10 Amazon gift card for referral! 

Edited April 30, 2015 by manutdftw

[adamski]

I used:

• Magoosh
• EmpowerGre
• the official GREguide 2nd edition
• the Manhattan 5 pound book

I agree. I found Magoosh helpful. If I had to pick between the two, I'd go with EmpowerGre because it goes into more tactical instruction, but I don't think you can go wrong between the two. If you want to save some money, you can cram EmpowerGre, you can save some money because one month of Empower is cheaper than Magoosh.

 

I think the 5 pound book is also a must.

 

Good luck!