Verbal Reasoning - Princeton Review?

[JP2107]

Can anybody shed some light on Princeton's Verbal Reasoning training, and how it fares against the other schools/strategies out there?

[Madz25]

I found PR's VR tougher than Kaplan's.

[Pantaloons]

I've done both TPR verbal and EK verbal.

TPR passages are more difficult than AAMC (or even EK/Kaplan); so, they're less representative of the actual test, but they'll challenge you.

 

My take on VR:

I sometimes find the TPR VR strategies to be far too mechanistic and distracting to be useful--not to mention time consuming.

 

I don't bother jumping around the VR section to rank each passage. You have to finish every single passage in order to get 10+, so what's the point? It just distracts you and takes up time. Just do every passage from beginning to end, and don't worry the difficulty level of each one--that's irrelevent.

 

I don't read every question before starting the passage because, in my opinion, you should be thinking soley about the Main Idea when reading the passage, not thinking about the questions. I just dive right in (after a 5 second breather between each passage...that's an EK strategy).

 

I highlight whatever I feel is relevant or necessary, and I don't explicitly go hunting for special words when I'm reading (like TPR suggests). After all, VR tests your sensitivity towards an author's thought process, not your ability to do a word-search.

 

Anyways, those are just my views. I certainly use strategies and tactics, I just don't employ them as mechanically as TPR suggests.

I've been getting roughly 10+ on every practice test for VR (though, admittedly, I did get a few 8s at the beginning).

 

Alrighty, back to studying (I write in 5 days!). I hope this helped.

Best of luck!

[The Law]

TPR's verbal is harder than the AAMC exams. It does not mean they're harder than what you'll get on test day though. I found the AAMC exams a lot easier than the verbal I got last year when I wrote.

 

I really think TPR's and EK101's passages are very good practice material. The TPR online exams though, have verbal sections that are very, very hard sometimes... much harder than what I experienced on test day last year.

[JP2107]

Is there any way for me to get more EK verbal resources than just the 101 book? And does anyone know anything about Oxford?