I need to study for the GRE and I was wondering what you suggest. I’ve been cruising Amazon for books, but they all seem kinda the same.
Any help that you can provide would be greatly appeciated,
The Educational Testing Services website is your friend (www.ets.org). Free info and practice tests (including software that gives two complete sample computer-based GRE general exams.) Good stuff.
Good luck!
I was happy with the Princeton Review book, but standardized tests are my talent in life. (Some people can sing, others dance, I take standardized tests very, very well.) Honestly, the books are all the same, but I preferred Princeton Review’s less reverent attitude - I found the others took the exam much too seriously, making it scarier than it should be.
The Verbal and the Math are very much like the SAT - how comfortable were you with that? The verbals are harder than the SAT, but the math is easier. (They have to write something that history majors who haven’t seen a number since eleventh grade have a prayer of doing decently.) The analytical section was the only part that I felt I had to study for, since it was a New Thing, but just doing a few dozen of those to get a sense of them was helpful. And once you register for the GRE, ETS willl mail you a CD with practice problems and two full-length adaptive computerized exams, exactly like the real thing, down to the learn-how-to-use-a-mouse tutorial. Take those, if for no other reason than to get used to taking a computerized exam, which takes a couple of minutes of mental adjustment. Good luck!
Do the computerized practice tests. I know Princeton Review offers a free one on their website, or do the one from ETS. An unexpectedly hard thing about the GRE is trying to do the reading passages on a computer. It’s really hard to have a feel for where in the passage a particular piece of information is located when you don’t have it printed on a piece of paper in front of you…
GRE for Dummies
Thanks all. I checked out the ETS site and (wonders of wonders) they were actually really helpful. I downloaded everything that I could and start there. I think the hadrest part with be the verbal stuff. In my searches some one suggested a book called “1000 Important Words”. I’ll take a look at it at Borders (then buy it from Amazon, like everyone else). It seems like a good idea.
The new Analytical Writing portion also scares me, so I’ll look into that too.
The only thing that ticks me off is that you can’t use your GRE score to get into Mensa since they changed the format. I was really hoping to kill two birds with one stone.
Wonder if I could still retake the SAT’s? 
On the GRE’s website, there is a list of topics for the analytical section. I highly recommend reading through them to get a feel for what they’ll ask. On the actual exam, take some time to sketch out your reasoning pattern before banging out a big response. A couple of “practice” writes would be helpful, I think. I managed a 5.5/6.0 on that section with minimal preparation, but think that being more diligent in the above would have landed me a 6.0. You’ll do fine on it.
BTW, I liked the Kaplan book pretty well.
It’s been a while since I took the GRE, and I can’t remember what books I used to prepare. But my experience was that the books were useful just to familiarize you with the formats of the test, so that you spend your time answering the questions instead of learning the format.
WARNING! The GRE changed last year, so don’t get any book with a date before 2003!