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Originally Posted by kurtisw
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Don't buy the big purple book. I don't remember the title or publisher (and
neither can any of the people around me), but we all bought the big purple
practice test book, and we all found it useless.
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Ah yes, that would be the book by REA. Yes, it is absolute garbage. One who studies Big Purple can only be hurt by it. The problems in the REA book, which require a ridiculous amount of memorization, are unlike anything on the real test, which required little memorization.
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I found that the practice exam booklet from the ETS was a big help, and I
even had some of the same questions on the GRE (including one tricky
question).
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Definitely. The problem is that ETS is no longer pubishing the books with the GRE's in them, so they are becoming scarce (but no less relevant).
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The reason that the physics GRE is required for astro graduate programs is
that basic physics is at the roots of all astronomy research and comes
up all the time (even if you're a lowly observer like me). The GRE, while
far from perfect, shows that the test taker has ability (or lack thereof) in
physics.
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Agreed. In astronomy grad school you have to take several graduate level physics classes. In addition, many of the graduate astronomy classes were really advanced physics classes wth a little astronomy phenomonology thrown in. Thus, when I was in grad school, Radiative Processes was 1/2 quantum and 1/2 E&M, ISM (Interstellar Medium) was mostly atomic physics, Instrumentation was 1/2 optics and 1/2 electronics, Galactic Dynamics had a heavy stat mech component, and so on. The funny thing is, unless you are doing theory, the research almost never requires any physics. The classes, however, definitely do.
As far as what books are best, there are the out-of-print ETS books mentioned previously. However, you should know that 75-80% of the test does not come from upper level physics courses, but instead from the 1st two years of physics. Of course, you have to understand the material from freshman and sophomore physics very thoroughly in order to get anywhere with it. Therefore, your physics texts from these years are going to be the most important.
In terms of working through the practice problems, the most important thing is
not to work through them.
By this I mean that you have to be able to approach most of the problems qualitatively rather than quantitatively. If the answer is some type of function, take the limits to see if the functions behave as they should (e.g. in a stat mech problem, if they give you a function for a number in a ground state as a function of temperature, you should know that as T goes to 0 they should all be in the ground state, and as T goes to infinity they should be evenly distributed between possible states). See if they have the right units. These skills are extremely important for the test.