Recently, I have observed a lot of GRE students studying rigorously from the Kaplan GRE Book ‘GRE Premier 2013’. Infact every other day I find someone tell me how bad Kaplan GRE Book is. It is no surprise that a lot of students resort to books and material readily available on the market or on the internet – Kaplan GRE Book is one of them. But time and again I have seen majority of GRE students fail. So the question arises: does this book provide all the good material that you need to get a high score in your GRE? This is what you’ll find today in this article.

In this review, I’ll be focusing on Kaplan GRE Book only. Now here’s the thing, I would never advice any of the GRE students to do their GRE preparation solely, from the Kaplan GRE Book, as it is fallacious and somewhat misleads the students. I had a GRE student come to me last week after having taken the GRE test – he prepared from this book. This is what he said when he came in – “The Kaplan GRE Math book does not cover all the revisions on the New GRE and consists of a lot of typos. Sometimes they also contained incorrect answers. Most of the questions were not up to the standard of the real GRE and some are so dumb that you wouldn’t bother.”

As a GRE instructor now let me have a review of what is there inside this book, which can result in misleading a student.

Quantitative Section

• Tons of practice questions but most of them are either too simple to come on the actual GRE and others are too complicated to even fickle your imagination. No doubt they have a lot of questions but what good they are if they do not reflect the actual difficulty level of the GRE exam.
• The basic concepts are taught well however there are insufficient techniques and short cut methods to quickly solve some hard GRE question types. Statistics is underdone. Infact so much so that it seems that GRE just doesn’t test any stats question – which is ofcourse not the case.
• I wouldn’t be surprised if someone comes up to me and say that they did 100% on all Kaplan questions but did miserably on the GRE exam. To conclude it just doesn’t cover enough topics in detail and strategies to feel comfortable.
• The quant section is littered with typos and erros which adds to the frustration.

Verbal Section

• Kaplan fails again in the sentence equivalence and completions types of questions. However it does marginally well than Barrons on reading comprehension practice. Most passages are up to the GRE standard and would definitely help you improve your RC’s. But otherwise its not to be taken any seriously.
  However do RC’s from Kaplan only after you are done with the Barrons and Princeton Review. It provides a good add-on.
• As for the sentence completion I would just say that again the level of questions is not up to the mark of GRE. Some are so superfluous and insanely easy that even a 2nd grader would judge correctly. The techniques and strategies for solving sentence completion and equivalence questions are also not any useful. In short stay away from everything on the verbal except RC’s.
• For vocabulary it is not suitable at all. Word lists focus on rote learning rather than learning in context. I must say that most of the words in there are not anything out of the ordinary. In short, Kaplan makes English language all tangled and messed up.

Writing Section

• First of all not enough sample essays, and practice that is required to get a good score on the analytical writing section. Secondly the techniques provided are so byzantine that a normal student will be lost. For those who have a decent level of writing good English can still use it as a supplementary preparation material but it is not recommended to those who don;t know much about writing.

Final Words

In summary, GRE Kaplan is not the book that you should be preparing with for your GRE, in order to get a good score. This book is also full of typos and errors, which is very frustrating when you’re trying to learn something as hard as GRE. It needs a complete overhaul.

Kaplan looks perfect on paper, but a close inspection of it results, that, it’s not the right book to study with, if are looking for a good score, or else you would end up unprepared for your GRE.