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I recommend starting to study for it a month or two in advance (or more!) if you want to learn NEW material. If you don't start early enough, you probably won't be able to remember much of anything new and will only have time to review what you already know and had forgotten (ie: highschool stuff).
I recommend the Kaplan study guide, but I haven't used any other guides, so I'm kind of biased. I thought it was useful for reviewing chemistry and the biology section is kind of extensive (it reviews and goes into a bit more depth about stuff we learned in highschool, like the heart, neurotransmitters, etc). In all, even if it isn't that helpful for you, it still has a full length exam at the back of the book (you can find more through torrenting, I think).
For the math section, it was fairly easy... I think there were a couple questions that involved integrals, but everything else was more or less high school material. For chemistry, it was mainly high school and first year stuff (like PV=nRT, enthalpy, etc). If you haven't taken second year orgo, don't fret. I found the biology section pretty hard and was surprised at the high mark I got in it. But I'm pretty good at chemistry so I focused mostly on biology when I was studying. MAKE SURE YOU REVIEW HIGH SCHOOL MATERIAL. If you still have binders and stuff from high school, REVIEW IT. Although the biology section may call for you to actually learn new material, which you will have to find through the study guides or just googling.
For the verbal section, I don't recommend learning new words... Unless you plenty of time, you're probably not going to remember the majority of the words. Focus on roots of words, instead. A tip for the verbal section (also mentioned in Kaplan) is that if the words in the question sound like nouns (or verbs), the answer will be a noun (or verb). This is actually pretty helpful, since I didn't recognize some of the words. I found the verbal section tricky because you can make more than one connection between the words in the example of the question and a couple of the answers were fairly similar. I'm not even going to try to help with reading comprehension because I bombed that section. For essays: practice! The time limit and writer's block will own you (well, if you're like me and you suck in English).
The worst part of the test is TIME. Do the easy questions first (there are a lot of these...), think through the tougher questions that you recognize, and don't even attempt the questions you have no clue how to do because they will just waste your time (unless you have time...). I found myself always having to guess at a couple questions in the last minute or so and had no time to check over my answers.
Wow, that was long. I don't even know if I answered your question.
Oh yeah, I haven't taken the prep course, so I can't say if it's good or not. But if you have time and the money to pay for it, I don't see the harm. Although, it's not really necessary to do well.
Last edited by ytpos : 04-04-2010 at 07:37 PM.
SciMania
says thanks to ytpos for this post.
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