I took the GRE test recently and got my scores.
(Verbal: 720/800, Quants: 800/800, AWA: 5.5/6.0).
I had heard many good reviews about Brilliant’s IIT JEE coaching. I had personally
never taken that coaching (had taken Agrawal Classes and found it to be really great),
but had heard enough good reviews about Brilliant that I joined its correspondence for
GRE. Much to my surprise, I found it to be a waste of time and money.
For verbal questions, knowing the correct answer is important. But equally important is
knowing the rationale behind an answer. But Brilliant’s study material just had a series
of verbal questions and answer sets. At no place did they explain why a particular
answer was correct. This is so crucial for tougher questions which have two very close
answers (specially reading passage questions). I found its verbal practice material
completely inadequate.
The level of toughness for Vocabulary related questions was much higher in Brilliant’s
exercises. The actual GRE didn’t stress so much on pure vocab questions. The stress
was more on analysis and understanding. Some people may feel that having tougher
questions is a good thing. However, it actually hampers your preparation because you
start focussing way too much on vocab rather than on understanding passages, word
relationships and analysing sentences.
Ditto for quantitative. The level of toughness was higher than actual GRE.
Many questions were outside of ’’syllabus’’. Though GRE doesn’t
seem to publish any official quants syllabus, its philosophy is to test basic (upto
10th grade) math only. GRE does not stress on complex or advanced formulae and it
definitely does not need you do detailed calculations. Brilliant’s exercises failed me on
both of these counts. It has questions that requires one to know fairly advanced
geometry and to perform detailed calculations. How do I know ? I saw the solutions
they provided. In real GRE, you will not have to calculate the decimal equivalent of
143/341. But in brilliant’s material, you have to. So, again, it just sent me on a wild
goose chase until I finally found some saner material from Barron’s guide.
The worst treatment was meted out to the essay writing section. Brilliant did give a
booklet for this section. But all it had was a printed version of the official ETS material
and some sample essays. What is really required is tips on how to write such essays.
There is absolutely NO advice given on how to write good essays. Again, I had to rely
on barron’s guide and the PowerPrep software. Basically, brilliant’s stuff is useless for
the essay part. Be ready to spend extra for that.
Thankfully, Barron’s guide had good tips on how to write good essays. That helped.
I took to blogging to practice my writing skills. I owe my high 5.5 AWA score completely
to Barron’s guide and my blogging effort.
To top it all, there were blatantly wrong answers in Brilliant’s answer keys. I lost confidence
after a few such mistakes occurred. Sometimes their own answer key won’t match the
part where they work out a quant problem. This was very irritating.
The icing on the cake was the fact that the material included questions which belonged
to the earlier Analytical section. Analytical section has been replaced by the essays. But
someone forgot to tell that to Brilliant. One of their ’’quant’’ sets was full of Analytical
questions. And worst part is, their model test papers had analytical sections.
In brief, I wasted by time and money on buying brilliant’s course. I was forced to spend
more money to buy other material.
I hope they have improved their course since the time I bought it. A lot of people think
brilliant is good. But their GRE course doesn’t live upto their reputation.