The Official Guide to the GRE revised General Test [Paperback]

This book is one of the earliest books available for the new revised GRE available in August of 2011. Most books are even weeks or months from even being released now and its already April of 2011. So in that regard, it was a valuable tool for people to get a jumpstart on the masses and see what is going on with this new test and what will be expected.

I loved the changes made to the reading comprehension sections. The book does detail all of the things that have changed from the old GRE. Getting this information straight from the test makers at least gives you confidence that they do know what they're doing.

An issue I had with the book is that it has review sections in math that glosses over an area and moves on. They mention that if you don't understand a concept or need more explanation, you will need to purchase some other book or review an old text on the subject. As I was working through the math section, I got an answer incorrect on a triangle problem. The problem was that when I went back to the triangle section, there wasn't any examples exactly explaining how to solve such a problem. This book does not provide an explanation for the review questions. They just give a list of answers. I think most of us learn by working a problem, then seeing where we went wrong in the process. It is a real drain to have to go back to another text to solve a problem. I had to go back and get my Barron's GRE book from last year to solve the problem. Barron's by the way has one of the most complete and almost too complete reveiws in math and vocabulary.

I took the test provided in the book and did pretty good. I will buy one of the other books when they come out in June or July and work through them and finally take the cd-rom version of the test in this book to see how I do. If you are looking for a good GRE book and it is already July or August, there are going to be books much better to choose from by this time.

Good luck on your GRE. I hope we all do well!!

This book was helpful and accurately represented what was on the new GRE. The CD was especially helpful because the practice tests were in the exact format with identical on screen calculator and timers as the real test. After reviewing with the CD there were no surprises when I took the actual test. The practice tests are also very representative of the questions on the real test, I got almost the exact same score on my practice tests as I did on the real test. Overall it was helpful and I would recommend it to other test takers.

All the information available in this book is also on the ETS website for free. Even the practice test on the CD is the Powerprep II software also available for free download from the site. While the information is indeed accurate, I would never recommend this book unless you have no access to a computer.