Departments and Programs Books

Murray Sperber shows the scandalous financial side to NCAA college sports in this well-crafted book. It's hardly news that college sports are corrupt - amateurism is and probably always was un-workable. What is news, however, is that most colleges lose money from their athletic programs. Readers see that while football and basketball might attract revenue, they seldom offset the losses from "non-revenue" sports like gymnastics, tennis, swimming, track, etc. Also, winning sports teams fail to increase academic donations to host colleges - alumni don't like their schools having "jock" reputations. The author shows how colleges abuse Pell and minority grants to benefit athletics, and how these institutions force students (or their parents) to pay hefty "activities fees" along with tuition to bail out the athletic department

Like most appeals to reform NCAA sports, this book fell on deaf ears - we simply like the games too much. Still, this book should be of interest to educators and to students forced to pay outrageous activity fees at tuition time.

How to evaluate and improve a university department? That has been a perennial and contentious topic in many universities. Wergin weighs in with several observations and suggestions.

The basic idea for moving forward is simple. The faculty should be closely involved in defining and promoting a department's mission and focus. This takes advantage of a desire amongst many academics for a sense of community and purpose within their department. The biggest problem is simply that, once tenured, individuals are largely autonomous. Plus, in order to get tenure, researchers often have to be very competitive within their fields. Wergin offers ways to counteract these tendencies. Appealing in part to that sense of community. Along with the notion that faculty working together often have greater political clout within a university.

FREEDOM FROM WAR: THE U.S. PROGRAM
FOR GENERAL & COMPLETE DISARMAMENT
IN A PEACEFUL WORLD (1961)

This document contains two of the worst fears of American constitutionalists.
These are:
1) the delegation of authority to an international governing body and
2) disarmament in accordance with that governing body's protocols

This document, which is a real State Department text, doesn't just propose "gun grabbing", it also recommends the disbanding of military forces! Legitimate military functions are limited to "preserving internal order" (a potential attack on the 3rd Amendment) and membership in the "United Nations Peace Force". The actual international disarming process would take place in three stages; these are laid out in the booklet. Also included is the "Declaration on Disarmament" which member nations would presumably be expected to sign on to.

If you want freedom from war, quit electing egomaniacs who love it!

"The manufacture of armaments would
be prohibited except for those of agreed
types and quantities to be used by the
U.N. Peace Force and those required
to maintain internal order."
~page 10

It's a slim volume and a bit expensive for being less than 100 pages, yet it gets to the point and gives you the nuts and bolts basics of WestEd's Program for Infant and Toddler Caregivers (PITC).

This is best used with Module I (Social-Emotional Growth & Socialization).

This is a great book and I definitely recommend it, but you really should get the premium program instead of the comprehensive program. The premium is the same book but also has a cd included which has four computer practice tests as well as lots of extra practice problems. It is well worth the extra cost for the premium book. I bought the comprehensive and after reading reviews about the premium, I realized I bought the wrong version and went ahead and bought the premium book in addition. I'm really glad I did.

I had ordered the book and selected free shipping. I wish the free shipping had faster delivery. The delivery date was set for about two weeks. I was surprised to receive the book in 10 days. Great service and product.

I aced my first practice test, then didn't do as well on the rest. I was studying tons, so my score should have gone up. I suppose it could have been operator error, but I think these practice exams are screwy.

Nevertheless, practicing on the computer did help me prepare for the format of the actual exam.

I used this guide to prepare for the GMAT but I find that it is only useful as a reference as to how the GMAT is mechanically structured. Whatever skills you need to achieve your required score will depend on your grasp of the different mechanics called out in the exam. Therefore, I recommend the Kaplan guide to be used as a tool to help you succeed and not to be used as a "pass the GMAT in 5 days" program. You receive sample exams after registering for the GMAT, and those exams are much more realistic than the Kaplan exams. The Pearson GMAT Prep software is 99% identical to the actual exam, but the Kaplan guide provides many more sample tests and tests for the different sections. I recommend pounding away at the sample tests and just practice. I raised my practice test scores by over 100 points just using the CD and GMATPrep programs, and the actual exam score exceeded my expectations.

if you wish to prepare for GMAT you need only two books official guide to GMAT and this kaplan gmat book .

I took the Kaplan practice tests before taking the GMAT. Like most people, I think the Kaplan tests differ significantly from what you'll see on the real GMAT. The Kaplan math questions were just as difficult as what I saw on the real test, while the verbal questions on the real GMAT were much easier than questions on Kaplan's practice tests.

It can be disappointing to see low scores on Kaplan practice tests after doing a lot of hard work. Keep in mind, though, that it's in Kaplan's best interests for you to improve on test day, rather than see your scores go down. Also, when you score poorly on practice tests after going through their book, you might be more likely to sign up for one of Kaplan's courses. However, I think the most reasonable explanation for test taker's consistently underperforming on Kaplan practice tests is simply that the scoring system is poorly calibrated.

I prepared for the GMAT by going through the Kaplan 800 book. For the sections I found most difficult, I went through the practice questions in the three "Official Guide for GMAT Review" books. I think the key to a good score is doing as many practice problems and practice tests as you can get your hands on.

My practice test scores were:

Kaplan Practice Test 1: 640 (14 days before the exam)
Kaplan Practice Test 2: 640 (10 days before the exam)
Kaplan Practice Test 3: 580 (5 days before the exam)
Kaplan Practice Test 4: 540 (3 days before the exam)
GMATPrep Test 1: 740 (2 days before the exam)
GMATPrep Test 2: 740 (1 day before the exam)
Actual GMAT: 760

The Kaplan tests helped me gain a sense of how much time I had to spend on each question. It was useful for me to see how rushed I would be at the end of a section as a result of spending just five minutes too long on the first 20-25 questions. On test day, I benefited from being disciplined enough to move on before getting bogged down on a question.

I thought the GMATPrep practice tests that you get when you sign up for the exam were the closest to what I saw on the real test. To me, the verbal section on test day was easy, while the math section had more tough questions than I had seen on any other exam. There were at least 3-4 math questions where I just guessed and moved on rather than waste time trying to come up with a solution. Just beware on test day that this won't ruin your chances of getting a solid score.

As most have stated, princeton review is the easier book, and the kaplan series are more difficult.

For someone shooting for a top ten, I would recommend using all of the books. I would start with princeton review to break you in and set the basics, take their practice tests to warm you up, they are a bit easier than the others. I would then move to the Kaplan series. Take ALL of the tests you can get a hold of... they are the best prep and ia good ndicator of your progress.

That said, you can have a bad score one day and a good score the next, but the practice will help prepare you for the real deal.

Finally do the problems in the official GMAT books! Make sure to do all of those problems. The problems in those books are the best.

I got this study guide back in 2006 because I thought I was going to take the GRE. In fact i'm scheduled to take the PCAT, though I can't knock the text here. Was fairly substantial and if I had to take it, this would have prepared me.

This book gave me a great strategy for the GRE and broke down the questions so I could quickly narrow down the choices. I also used the vocabulary flip book. I got a great score and only studied for 3-4 weeks.

Don't buy this book for the online test. The registration code in the book didn't work. They sent another after I called. Then, after filling in several really annoying registrations forms multiple times (each time I logged in I had to repeat the same forms to "confirm" the information-and you have to fill out every annoying field!), another phone call and much frustration, I still haven't been able to access the free online test. Over an hour wasted. UGH!

Supposed to be instucting us toward "flawless" GRE performance??? How can they charge that much for something with an inexcusable number of errors? I printed the corrections sheet from their website which covered only a few of the many errors in the book. In the section on "tricks" to doing GRE math problems, I found ways to solve the the practice problems that were missed in the answers section! (And I didn't do all that well on the math part of the test.) What does this tell us about the level of the people writing the answers?! Sorry, but it's just annoying! These people are making the big bucks off all of us!

Practice test one:
Score: Verbal: 506 Quantitative: 420
Practice test two:
Score: Verbal: 600 Quantitative: 480
Practice test three (3 hours before taking GRE):
Score: Verbal: 520 Quantitative: 500

(This had me an emotional wreck the day of the GRE)

MY ACTUAL First time GRE SCORES:
Verbal: 720 Quantitative: 620

My only belief is that this book and program is designed to convince you to buy the courses. That being said, the 30 minute math tests did make me feel like I had all day to do the quant on the GRE.

I'm not sure this helped me very much. I think I would've been better off just with a math review book.

AND it is full of typos at critical points. For example, in one QC test problem it says "Circle 1 intersects Circle 2 and EXACTLY two points" and the problem requires it to be intersected at exactly one point to be solved.

I'd like to underscore the comments of others regarding the numerous typos and overall sloppy editing of both the book and CD. It's one thing to have some typos, but it's another thing to have information missing from graphs and completely garbled reading comprehension passages. That some of this information was intended to be there is usually made obvious by the explanations. This will prove frustrating if you're trying to get an accurate gauge of where you stand, especially with the computer based testing. (i.e. If you get wrong answers because information was missing or mistyped, you are still wrong and get different questions than you would have otherwise.)

Given the above disclaimer, I did find the test taking strategies and advice useful. Moreover, the explanations for the answers are helpful when you legitimately got the questions wrong.

Truth be told, the strategy and explanations make this guide useful, but that's only because of the dearth of better products. So, while shoddily executed, the book is a useful, if frustrating, second source.

This book guides you to pass the GMAT exam with several exercises to help you to be familiar with the exam.

The book is quite helpful in giving little tips when taking/studying the GMAT exam. It does also provide some insight into what the test is looking for, but it definitely is not the end of all for GMAT prep books.

I bought this book for GMAT when I was done with Official guide but in retrospect, I think that if you are a new-bie in the world of GMAT and especially looking for crucial strategies to attempt different sections of GMAT, this book will be really helpful.

I found it really cool for strategies regarding RC and CR sections of GMAT verbal.

You can refer to this book and side by side you can solve the questions from Official Guide of GMAC (OG 11).

Besides that, this book has lots of sectional questions which are good (although not exactly like GMAT). Plus it comes with a CD which has 4 full GMAT mocks and sectional tests for all the sections of GMAT Quant and Verbal.

Best of luck!

Re: Kaplan GMAT Premier Program 2009 Edition

It's amazing to me that a company of the stature of Kaplan would have so many errors in a book intended to train for a test. It's hard to have confidence in their services.

Here are some of the numerous errors I found in the math section of this book.
The math section is a pathetic study guide. The errors are so numerous, that it's hard to know when it's right. See below - and this is only as far as I got. I will return this poor "study guide" and request my money back.

I contacted Kaplan; they said they would have an errata sheet posted early Sept 2008; it's now mid-Sept, and no errata sheet is posted.

I'll try another publisher.


Page 272, prob 10, error in first line; fist x-intercept missing (3/2)
Page 279, prob 6; 8x-2 should be 8x-3
Page 289, prob 4; units are meters in the sketch and inches in answers
Page 322, prob 7; missing "+" sign in equation
Page 323, prob 4; indicates use of calculator, but GMAT instructions say no calculators are allowed

Page 326, prob 6; solution includes "y" in solution; there is no "y"
Page 328, prob 10; equation has both plus and minus signs, (x-+5)

Page 285, 30-60-90 example shows 1:1:sqrt2; should be 1:2:sqrt3
Page 299, prob 2; Greek letter for pi is "p" in answer E; confusing
Page 300, prob 3; Greek letter for pi is called "p"; confusing
Page 300, prob 4; Greek letter for pi is called "p"; confusing
Page 301, prob 5; missing info: need to tell me that A in on line OB
Page 305, prob 5; angle CDE and DEC are both 45 deg, but not drawn equal

This is an excellent book for trying to understand the problems between Ireland and England. Also the problems between fellow Irishmen: Prostestants and Catholics.

On the face of it, Marcus Tanner's history of Ireland's religious conflicts looks impressive. Although Tanner is an English journalist, his book is published by a leading university press, it possesses 39 pages of notes to 431 of text, and its bibliography contains many primary sources as well as considerable research among eccelesiatical journals and centuries old books. Tanner's thesis, according to the cover is that "the roots of the Irish conflict are profoundly and inescapably religious," the consequences of England's failed attempt to turn Ireland into a Protestant country.

A closer look reveals some problems. Tanner has written a history of Ireland while ignoring most of the leading historians of the subject. Marianne Elliot goes unmentioned, as does everyone's favorite trio of anti-nationalist Marxists, Paul Bew, Henry Patterson and Peter Gibbon. Nicholas Canny gets only a couple of articles, as does Kevin Whelan. One of the leading concepts in Irish ecclesiastical history, "the denominational revolution" goes completely unnoticed, and so does Emmett Larkin. John Whyte's nuanced history of church-state relations in independent Ireland is nowhere to be found. Donal Kerr's recent book on the Catholic Church and the famine is ignored. The economic historiography of Ireland is also passed over, no mention is made whatsoever of Vaughan, Clark, Moody, O'Grada or Kinealy.

But then that is not surprising, since the economic history of Ireland is also passed over. There is no coherent account of the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland or its consequences, outside of its effects on the Catholic church. The Irish potato famine gets only five pages, and mass emigration gets even less, much less than the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1868. In fact the "religious" origins of the struggles is not really coherently presented. In the first few chapters the "Old English" and the Celtic inhabitants are shown to be quite capable of quarrelling despite their common Catholicism. The Catholic hierarchy shows little sympathy to the 1798 rebellion or to Fenianism, and Tanner spends the relatively few pages on the current "Troubles" showing the Protestants and Catholics trying to encourage an ecumenical peace. (The emphasis is on the good will of the Protestant denominations; the role of the Unionist parties, by contrast, isn't even mentioned. On the other hand Tanner views Ireland's political parties as the Catholic Church's willing toadies.)

What we have then is a journalistic effort more eccentric than scholarly. Much of it consists of journalistic anecdotes, such as the appalling state of Irish butter in the 1500s, or illegitimacy among Irish priests, or Machiavellian Anglican bishops. As a history of Irish religion it is curiously old-fashioned. Compared to the sophisticated historiography of the Reformation of such scholars as Christopher Haigh, Ronald Hutton, Gerald Strauss, Eamon Duffy and David Parker, it seems quaint and shallow. Rather than the sophisticated research about what people actually thought, the depth of their Christian convictions, the chimera of popular "paganism", the social role played by Christian institutions and other matters what we get is a history that looks at the bishops and the preachers and assumes the diffusion of their efforts. The last few chapters are particulary unsatisfactory. Gerrymandering in Derry corporation gets only a paragraph, discrimination and the Special Powers Act in Northern Ireland gets even less, but we get several pages on the rather marginal topic of Catholic anti-semitism. The final two chapters exude a shallow complacent attitude of "modernization" sweeping away the dark shadows of Catholicism's influence.

The idea that the Irish conflict is a religious one seems like common sense. Yet there are several major problems with it. For a start if England had not broke with the Church over Henry VIII's divorce, would the subsequent conquest of Ireland have been any nicer? There are other problems. Are the members of Sinn Fein or the Democratic Unionist Party more religious than their compatriots? Not really. Only one Catholic priest has died in the Troubles, one accidentally shot by the English army. Only one Protestant minister has been killed, and he was a leading Unionist politician. Sinn Fein has actually been more liberal on abortion than the Social Democratic and Labor Party. Northern Ireland's urban areas are both more violent and less religious than the rest of the province. In Richard Rose's loyalty survey only 8% of Protestants volunteered that they disliked the Irish Republic because of interference by the Catholic Church. It is not clear that denominational education are encouraging sectarian struggle (they don't in Canada). Tanner does not really discuss any of these matters. Ultimately, this is a book which sheds less light on Ireland than on the limits of journalism.

This history of Irish religion may have trouble finding an audience. Its rather exclusive focus on Irish ecclesiastical history in the past 500 years will not satisfy readers expecting a more general account of Cromwell, King Billy of Orange, the IRA and the rest of the Troubles. Moreover, it apparently is not scholarly enough to placate more learned specialists (see other review, below).

As an intermediate pupil of Irish history, however, I found this an enjoyable read. Tanner, a journalist rather than a professional historian, synopsizes some fairly dense material and keeps it lively. He is a master of the devastating thumbnail sketch. For example, the failure of the reformation in Ireland can be partly attributed to the low quality of the churchmen responsible for its implementation, such as the disagreeable, mediocre, corpulent English Archbishop of Dublin, Browne, and the slippery Irish Bishop of Cashel, Miler Magrath, who became rich from embezzlement and confiscation, and was "little better than a gangster who galloped about his diocese in armour, preceded by outriders and a man carrying a skull on a tall pole."

Writing about the evangelizing Protestants during the Famine who were accused of "souperism," or buying converts with food, Tanner cites one obtuse clergyman who defended himself by boasting that not one penny of his funds had been wasted on famine relief. He became exalted preaching to one group of "living skeletons" in Connemara, who in all probability would soon become first-hand witnesses to the glory of God that he described (Tanner puts this better, but I don't have the book in front of me).

The Catholic Church as well comes in for some well-deserved roasting, particularly those monumentally arrogant princes of the church who dominated the political life of the Republic until toppled by the sex scandals of the 1990s, exemplified by Archbishop Croke, an "oriental pasha" who made and unmade Parnell and other politicians.

Some of Tanner's choices are indeed eccentric (why does the chapter on the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 precede the chapter on Daniel O'Connell and his agitating priests of the 1820s?), and a few errors creep in (the patrician, peripatetic William O'Connell at one point is assigned to New York, when of course "Gangplank Bill" was Cardinal of Boston).

As well, Tanner doesn't give enough credit to the churchmen, North and South, who played a crucial role in finally ending the Troubles (see last year's Secret History of the IRA), ironically when both Catholicism and Protestantism are dwindling in importance in a secular modern Ireland. (Archbishop Croke and de Valera would fulminate to see the girls of Dublin today in their miniskirts and platform shoes tottering about the discos of Temple Bar.)