27 January 2011

GRE Website Review

After weeks of study, I recently took the GRE exam, which is the exam you have to take in order to try and apply to most graduate school programs, for anyone who isn't familiar with it. I'm trying to get my Masters in Creative Writing, and although only one (New York University) of the four (Brooklyn College, The New School, Columbia University) schools I applied to required the GRE, I still had to pay about $115 and take the GRE test.

The other day I came across this GRE prep site, GRE Prep Book, run by 3 UC Berkley graduate students. Like many of the GRE prep sites I frequented while studying for the exam, this website is simple, without much flash or pomp. While that adds to easy navigation and user friendliness, I found that there is a bit of repetition between the side links and the bottom links on the homepage. The site's plain appearance takes away from - for lack of better words - it's potential for seduction. Call me shallow, but a website's appearance is a major factor in whether or not I decide to peruse through it's pages and with the GRE Prep Book website, I don't get that little tingle of excitement that tells me: this is a well-run, well-kept, and more than quasi-official website.

I decided to browse the site anyway, and discovered that the material on the site - and there is a ton of it - is actually really helpful if you're looking for practice questions. There isn't too much instruction on how to answer the questions, but there are a fair amount of questions to answer and a lot of word lists, giving examples of antonyms and synonyms and word pairs. Although I think this would not be helpful to someone looking for lots of instruction, it would have been helpful to someone like me, just looking to do practice questions and go over some vocabulary. It would have been even more helpful if they had pointed out high frequency words and questions most likely to be seen on the GRE exam itself.



Link:  http://greprepbook.org

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