Physics GRE Discussion Forums

i kinda slacked off on studying, but i'm starting to get back into gear. i'm taking the test in less than a week, and i still have to go through a majority of my notes. i was able to get about 20 problems right on my first run through the practice test without studying, so i'm not completely out of it. but one problem i have is that i have no clue where my freshman physics notes are, so anything i learned during my first year is practically forgotten. plus, my mechanics class SUCKED (i failed it because the professor was horrible and i didn't realize how much work it would be), so i don't even have good notes for mechanics.

one of my fellow students has this book, and the review section of it looks pretty good. the problem is, although the MSRP on the book is less than $30, the cheapest i can find it for is $80 and i don't have that much money. is there any way i could get a copy of this book for cheap?

here is the book in question:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id= ... lt#PPP1,M1

rule of thumb... there are no good books for the physics gre. some are too easy, other too numerical, other just down right wrong.

The best guess would be the schaums 3000 to brush up on stuff from freshman year really.

Yup. No good books for GRE Physics. Just use the sample exams released by ETS. It really helped me a lot in my review.You can download them here:

http://physics-problemsets.blogspot.com ... exams.html

I don't know if the REA book would be particularly good for brushing up on concepts, probably the best method for doing this would be to just pick up a copy of an old textbook in your local library. Still, if you want practice with multiple choice questions, the REA book can have it's place. I used it for studying the second time I took the PGRE and I feel that it really helped me get faster at working multiple choice physics problems. The key things to remember is that it has a pretty high percentage of typos (keeping this in mind will help you not get so frustrated) and that most of the questions are substantially harder (conceptually or computationally) than anything you will find on a real GRE. I'd read this article if you want more information on the REA book and advice on which questions are worth studying.

Nevertheless, with this little time left, I think melchizedekk is right... just take the sample exams and study the solutions (user solutions are posted here)!!!

What about textbooks with good problems that I could work through? Most textbook problems are way too long or "proofy" for the Physics GRE, but would the 1-star difficulty level problems and the "basic concepts" problems be the ones that apply most to the Physics GRE?

And which textbooks are the best repositories for such problems?