I have been teaching GRE and helping students prepare for standardized tests for several years now. The Princeton review is a big name in test preparation and they generally do really well when it comes to writing material for standardized tests. But when it comes to new revised GRE, Princeton review has been mostly disappointing with all the material they have put on the market thus far – including their main book cracking the GRE 2013.

SEE ALSO: Book Review of Cracking the GRE 2013 by Princeton Review

Lately I decided to purchase another book by Princeton review called “1014 GRE Practice Questions (3rd edition)”. And to my utmost chagrin, this is the worst amongst all of their latest material for the new GRE.

First of all let me set this straight – this is not a book to learn any basics or any advanced level GRE techniques or strategies. As its name suggests it is simply a practice book, which has 1,014 practice and example questions along with one complete mock test.

Let me say this: after I read this book for a few days I strongly felt the urge to rename this book to 1,014 errors. And when I say this I am not being sarcastic or humorous – this book is riddled with errors, typos and grossly incorrect answers and solutions.

The math sections are filled with errors so glaring that even a dumb student would feel being fiddled with. I found at least 1 error per exercise and sometimes more than 30% of the questions had wrong answers. Tens of questions were totally wrong and had incomplete data or information.

SEE ALSO: Book Review of GRE Big BOOK By ETS

I know that all books have some errors but this book has errors in a magnitude that is completely unacceptable. Worst of all, this is the 3rd book in its series and still it fails miserably to rectify the basics issues that persist since its first edition.

Allow me to numerate some errors:

• Some questions were written such that the right answer wasn’t listed or it was listed incorrectly.
• The key indicated wrong answer but the explanation was contradictory.
• Several questions had more than one correct answer.

Please don’t study the data interpretation section

The data interpretation section is fraught with wrong questions, answers and typos. My advice is not to look at any data analysis questions from this book – it is a nightmare. My rough guess is around 40% of the questions had problems. It would be better having a ferret crawl around in your pants then trying to do questions from this section of the book.

SEE ALSO: How many GRE questions can You miss and still get a perfect Score?

Now how could you trust the verbal practice when you know the math is filled with so many errors? Moreover, it is far more challenging to identify what is “wrong” in the verbal questions. The Reading Comprehension is ordinary and I am pretty sure it has a few erroneous answers as well.

The purpose of a GRE book is to ease your nervousness and test anxiety. These kinds of errors destroy a student’s self-confidence and affect their ability to perform at a higher level. If you don’t have someone to walk you through the problems you will definitely be wasting a lot of time identifying the good from the bad.

In summary: 1,000+ practice problems have a positive prospect for your GRE preparation but if the questions are so riddled with insidious errors then this could easily torpedo your confidence.

This book is beyond frustrating and I would request the dearest Princeton to get over with these problems in sincerity.

Plus what is wrong with the guys at Princeton? For the past three Editions THERE IS NO ERRATA.