DISCLAIMER: The following post is short on data, long on
opinion and testimonial.
On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] went:
> Deb's posts on the changes in the GRE reminded me of a student
> question that I meant to pass along to you all. Are there any
> particular books or software programs on preparing for the GRE that
> you've found to be particularly useful for students.
If you're talking specifically about the Psych GRE: I haven't seen the
software programs, but I've looked at the books and found them
terribly untrustworthy. They may be handy for practicing one's
test-taking skills, but any factual material they present (in their
review sections and in their "explanations" for "correct" answers)
needs to be checked elsewhere.
Now, n=1 here, but when I was preparing to take the Psych GRE in 1988,
I sat down with a textbook from each field of psychology in which I'd
never taken a course. I'd been an English major before starting to
study neuropsych, so there was a lot of ground to cover--most notably
social, personality, and developmental! But I read each textbook as
if I were reading it for pleasure, because, after all, the GRE Psych
test requires only recognition, not recall. I also took the sample
tests in the Barron's GRE prep book, but when the textbooks disagreed
with the prep book, I trusted the textboooks. When I took the Psych
GRE a few months later, I scored in the 93rd percentile (around 650,
if I recall correctly).
I hereby acknowledge that the preceding paragraph does not constitute
evidence that my "pleasure reading" technique will work for anyone
else, or even that it worked for me--though I think I did.
Now, how wrong can the prep books be? Heh. Below is something I
posted on my class Web site in 1997 after a particularly horrifying
glimpse at one such book:
-------------------------
When students ask me about published study guides for the Psychology
GRE, I always recommend the Barron's book above all the others,
because the others contain some outrageous errors (you should
especially avoid the one that calls itself "The Best"; I forget the
rest of its title, but it's full of mistakes).
Today in Borders, I looked at the 1997 revision of the Barron's book.
It still looked pretty good overall. But one of the practice
questions required finding the "rhinencephalon" on a map of the brain.
Of course "rhinencephalon" is an ambiguous and obsolete term, and
besides, it didn't seem to correspond to any of the areas that were
marked. So I checked the answer key. Hoo boy!
The good folks at Barron's said that the "rhinencephalon" corresponds
to a spot that they'd marked in orbitofrontal cortex; then they went
on to explain that the rhinencephalon is "a brain stem area [?!]
consisting of primitive cortex and subcortical structures [?!]; it is
the oldest part of the cerebral hemispheres [?!]." Y'know, if one of
the students in my smaller classes had written this hallucinatory
jumble on a short-answer test--after marking a spot in orbitofrontal
cortex, no less--I'd have said "You need to start coming to my office
hours."
The Barron's book is still the best of the bunch, as far as I can see,
and it will generally help you. But when parts of a GRE-review book
seem wrong to you, trust yourself (and your real textbooks).
