Kaplan GRE Exam Vocabulary Prep,   ISBN:9781419550027

Customer Rating: 

This is a great tool to cram before the GRE. It contains an awesome word selection.

Customer Rating: 

I have been working with the vocabulary in this book and it is very useful if you make vocabulary flashcards, writing the synonyms and your own sentence using the word. Thus, you raise your GRE vocabulary so you do well on the verbal section of the GRE and also helps you start actually using those words in your own writing.

As an International Student, I can say this Kaplan GRE Vocab Workbook helps you raising your score. If you have a GRE study group, it can be quite fun to practice writing your own sentences and sharing with your friends.

Customer Rating: 

I bought this book to carry with me during my commute to work. It is about the size of a paperback novel and it is very conducive to studying while you travel. That is about the only thing it has going though.

Frankly, after running across mistake after mistake I got more than a little peeved. Here is a company selling an overpriced book, that basically just requires typing up some definitions, and they didn't even have the courtesy to do a proof-read. Mistakes I found include:

-Misspelled words
-Words in the incorrect alphabetical order
-Using the word itself as it's own definition
-Using the word itself at it's synonym
-Forgetting to list the synonyms
-Repeating the same definition twice for the same word ( ex. "strong; forceful; strong"
-Using words found later in the book as the definition for the earlier "easier" words

I know these are nit-picky things, but there is just something annoying about holding a 14 dollar book meant to teach you new words and realizing that the company selling it didn't even run a spell-check. Plus this book is really bare-bones(no learning activities or root word lists like in Barron's), combine that with a hefty price tag, not a lot of words (490), and lots of typos and you start feeling like you got bamboozled.

If you really need a small book for travel then maybe it would warrant a purchase (although you might be better off with Barrons Essential Words book). It obviously does a satisfactory job of telling you a word and then it's definition, but you could get more bang for your buck elsewhere.