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eponymous_roseWell, I threatened to do this, and I got the dreaded shopping trip out of the way this morning, so I officially have no reason not to. Little bits and pieces of advice for the GRE follow! Keep in mind that the format is changing fairly dramatically after August 1, 2011 (you can read about it here - bigger than all the content changes is the fact that you will be able to revisit past questions, change your answers, etc.), so some of these tips won't apply. Also, this is all applicable to the general test - the subject tests are a different beast, and I was lucky enough to be in a field that's juuuust different enough from both math and physics that I could avoid taking either subject test.
If you're taking the GRE, or remotely considering taking the GRE, this might be helpful. If not, I hope it's at least somewhat entertaining.
My situation, right up-front, so you can decide how much to trust me on this: I took the GRE with two weeks' notice, studied in the evenings when I wasn't at school, and missed a few days here and there. I paid $40 for one guidebook (more on that soon), and apart from that, it was all free material online. I'm a scientist in my first year of a Master's degree, and I haven't taken a class in the Humanities since high school. I scored 790Q and 760V, and haven't heard back yet about my analytical writing. Some things have to be kept vague because of the non-disclosure agreement I signed prior to my test.
First and foremost, you'll get a lot of people telling you that there's no way to improve your score substantially on the GRE, which would be true if it were a genuine test of your current ability to handle graduate school. Since it is, in fact, the quintessentially arbitrary standardized test, it tests nothing more than your ability to take standardized tests, which is definitely a skill you can cultivate. Here's a quick rundown of the test prior to August 1, 2011:
1. An analytical writing section, graded out of 6 with half-point increments,
and, in any order:
2. A mathematical section, graded out of 800 with ten-point increments, and
3. A verbal section, graded out of 800 with ten-point increments.
You're also likely to see some sort of experimental section in which the GRE folks test new question types. This section doesn't count toward your grade, but it may or may not be marked as such, so if in doubt, just assume that every section is important and do your best on all of them. I got an additional essay question at the end of mine, marked as experimental, but there was the added incentive of a chance to win $250 (which would exactly cover my test fee and the cost of the one prep book I bought), so I definitely stuck it out through that.
There's a ten-minute break between section one and the last two sections; the whole test takes about four hours. If you need extra breaks, or special permission to bring food into the testing center for health reasons, there's an application form you can fill out on the official GRE website. You're also allowed to leave the testing area for a brief break at any time (although this rule may vary depending on the testing center), but the clock keeps ticking, and you'll probably find you're pretty tight for time on this one - I'm the sort of person who's always the first to finish exams, and my fastest time for completing a section left me with only a minute or so to spare. I'll talk briefly about each section, and give some advice for studying on each.
The Analytical Writing Section
This section currently consists of two essays: the issue essay and the argument essay. Both are pretty dang straightforward, and knowing you, flist, you'll do very well on these with little preparation. The best advice I can give is to time yourself doing these at least twice, to work on your time-management accordingly (for instance, I found that if I did five minutes of prep, thirty-five minutes of frantic typing, and five minutes of proofreading, I could come up with 700 words that didn't make me want to bury my head in the sand - but you might have another strategy that works better for you). Keep in mind that the admissions committees for all universities that receive your scores have the right to request to read these essays, so they're not just getting crunched up by a machine that spits out a number and destroys the rest.
You have 45 minutes to do the issue essay, and you're given a choice between two topics. The complete pool of topics from which these two will be selected is actually available here, so you can read through and get a feel for them. The point is to express your opinion on a given issue, so you want to be able to have a position that can be summed up in a pithy statement, but you also want to show the breadth of your understanding of the issue by acknowledging the validity of the opposition. Using absolutes is probably not a good plan, because using words like "always" or "never" makes it very difficult to show that you so much as acknowledge the existence of a second side to the issue. It is, of course, fun to point out other people's hyperbolic statements - going the route of "So-and-so argued that censorship is unequivocally bad because blah blah" is probably smart, because the use of examples? Always a good plan. Keep in mind that the graders for these exams are typically graduate students - it might warm the cockles of their hearts to see the odd literary reference thrown in. Showing a little variety can be nice as well - as an example, I quoted both Isaac Newton and Arthur Conan Doyle in the same paragraph of my essay.
If you're freaking out, going "Does this mean I have to go memorize pithy statements spoken by anyone remotely awesome so I can use them as examples?", well, you can if you would like to? It would probably be fun at parties. But I think you'd be surprised at how many handy little aphorisms you've picked up over the years. You don't have to quote literature or famous folks, either - if the topic has to do with the power of the media to influence public opinion, you could mention the racially biased coverage after Hurricane Katrina, for instance. If you want a strict format, think back to high school and go for something like this, which is approximately what I have in mind when I write an issue essay:
Paragraph One: Intro. Bring in a 'hook' of some sort: your strongest example, in descriptive language. Don't worry about flirting with cliché - the effort at doing something a little different will be appreciated, and besides, we're going for substance over flair, here. Describe the issue stated in as neutral terms as possible, and then take one side of it quite firmly, using the same language as in the prompt to make sure you're on the right track. Your side of the argument is your fortress, and you will now throw things at it to see how well it holds up. Make a reference to the opposing point of view, but restate that you believe the advantages of your position outweigh the disadvantages of the opposition, and segue neatly into-
Paragraphs Two-Sixish: (I will note here that I type very, very quickly and don't give myself time to edit or think about what I'm writing until the end - if you're more given to careful deliberation, two or three paragraphs here will probably be fine.) Organize based on example. If you're looking for ways in which the past shapes the future, talk science, politics, literature, art. Four paragraphs right there. Move quickly - edit if you have to, but you're going for speed here, and the more ideas you can get down on paper, the better. This is a race against the clock - if one idea or sentence just isn't coming together, scrap it and move on. I should also note that the GRE sample exams feature an essay that was actually incomplete (it cuts off mid-sentence), but still scored a perfect grade because there was so much quality content involved. Get your ideas on the paper. This is not a test of how beautifully you can communicate your ideas - it's a test of how well you can form an opinion, attack it, and defend it in forty-five minutes. Take that attack-defend approach - state an example that supports your position, come up with a counterexample or opposing argument, refute that argument, and move on. Your goal is to prove here that you've given it a lot of thought, and that, in the final analysis, your opinion is still the most valid. (And yes, you'll probably find yourself defending opinions you don't actually hold - even if you truly feel that X is right, it might be easier to prove X wrong in forty-five minutes. All part of the artificiality of the test.)
Final Paragraph: This is your victory lap! You should have about five to ten minutes left on the clock at this point. Restate the issue using the prompt's language, restate your position, and summarize the pros and cons of that position, ending with an "in the final analysis, my position is the awesomest" sort of idea. If you're really awesome, you'll come up with some sort of final sentence that ties in perfectly with the 'hook' back in the first paragraph. And your grader will weep tears of joy and give you all the very best grades.
GRE training books for this part of the exam are often aimed at folks who have much less experience with writing than you bloggers do, so you get a lot of "'however' is a transition word that enables you to change the tone of your sentence" and whatnot. If you think this sort of advice would be helpful, or if you have a tendency to freeze up on exam-type essay questions, the one book I used for preparation was the Princeton Review's "Cracking the GRE", and they had quite a substantial section at the back that focused on teaching you to write these essays in a formulaic way. If you've ever suffered from exam anxiety, you know as well as I do how important it is to have something simple and formulaic to fall back on in case of emergency - that's a good plan B. Always, always have a plan B. Keep in mind that a straight-up application of their formula isn't likely to earn you more than a "meh" sort of mark, but if that's all you need? Go for it. (Note that the analytical writing section is often considered to be less important for native English speakers - it's mostly a quick-and-dirty measure of your ability to string sentences together in English.)
Second is the argument essay, which has a thirty-minute time limit. This one's fun, and is ridiculously easy to structure if you've ever read an LJ post you disagreed with. No choices here - you're given a short paragraph (you can see the pool of topics here) containing an argument, usually presented as a letter to the editor. The argument will be seriously flawed. If you don't see flaws in the argument, read it again. And again. Pretend it's an LJ post by someone you really, really dislike. You know, when you just have to go in and nitpick every little assumption they ever made in a really passive-aggressive way? Yeah, that's the one.
Make a list of the assumptions being made, here. There are a few different kinds of assumptions, and this is where people with formal training in the field of logic or statistics are gonna have a field day. Probably the most common assumption is the sampling assumption you might remember from your Stats 101 class - a small subset of a population experiences X, so they must all experience X. "My friend had terrible service at this restaurant, so the next people who visit there will also get terrible service.": this one doesn't acknowledge the fact that hey, man, your friend's kind of a jerk. Another is the causal assumption - A causes B, and therefore B cannot exist without A (and nothing else causes B, either). "I always feel tired when I jog at 3AM, so running must make me sleepy.": this one doesn't acknowledge the fact that you are awake at 3AM, which may have more to do with your drowsiness. A third is the analogy assumption - I was able to do A, and because A and B are sorta similar, I should be able to do B as well. "I aced the SATs without studying, so I'll be able to do the same with the GREs as well.": this one... well, okay, so you probably could, for all I know. You rebel, you.
Keeping these assumptions in mind, go back and read through your topic. Make a list on your scratch paper of all the flawed assumptions in the argument. Now you're ready to start. As I said before, think of this as an LJ entry by your arch-nemesis. Someone hating on your OTP, someone trolling with ridiculously flawed political statements, someone refusing to own up to the huuuge omissions in their arguments. You've just been given a chance to take the wind out of their sails and gain the acclaim of the entire community. Forget "don't engage the troll". Forget "tl;dr". This is your moment of glory! Yessss.
Paragraph One: Very briefly restate the argument that's being made. What's its main purpose? What's it trying to convey? You don't want to get too bogged down at an early stage here - this is a short timeframe to write something in, so you want to get to your counter-arguments as quickly as possible. "The goal of this argument, which is to blah blah blah, seems sound on first glance, but makes several fundamental omissions and unsubstantiated assumptions, chief among them the blah, the blah, and the bleeblebloo." Bam. Done.
Other Paragraphs: Yeah, this is where you talk about the aforementioned blah, blah, and bleeblebloo. But hey, fun as it is to poke holes in someone's argument, with these arguments it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. You need something to make your essay stand out. How? Simple: you don't just want to destroy the heck out of that argument, you want to do that and go "of course, if I were on your side, I would've phrased it like this and everyone would've agreed with me because the argument would then be just that awesome, hahaha, can your puny mind even handle that". Think of this as the "if you had considered phrasing it in this way, I might've listened to you" stage of the LJ comment-battle. Or the other thing, with the evil laughter. Come up with ways to improve the argument - often, this is as simple as calling for an acknowledgement of the opposing viewpoint, or the release of additional statistics to clarify matters.
Final Paragraph: Victory lap again! This is the time to make your opponent realize just how thoroughly they've been pwned. You're probably running low on time at this point (typing all those "hahaha"s takes time, after all), so a quick summation should be sufficient.
And there you go! You're done the analytic writing section. The maximum possible score is 6, and average entry scores at universities in the States tend to hover around the 4.5 range for the humanities, and at around 4.0 for the sciences. I should add a disclaimer that I haven't received my scores on this section yet, so all of what I said above could be totally wrong. Follow this advice at your own risk. Anyway, lots of people find this section quite draining, which is why the GRE folks have kindly offered you a ten-minute break. Thanks, GRE folks! Even if you're not a break-taking sort of person, you should stand up and wave your arms around for a bit, jog in place, whatever it takes to get the blood flowing again.
How should you prepare for the analytic writing section? It's up to your faith in your writing abilities. For me, I only really found it necessary to do the two free PowerPrep exams on the GRE website (yes, it's worth downloading an XP virtual machine to run - it's exactly the same software used on the exam), holding myself to strict timing, and running them at the same time as the real exam: 3:30PM.
You should do practice exams at the same time of day as the real thing to get a feel for how hungry/tired you're likely to be. As to what you should do during the break, figure out what you need. If you tend to crash soon after an energy drink, don't drink it. If you get wobbly without eating during the break, bring a banana or something. Know your limits - you want to get the best possible grade on this thing, and by eliminating these possible sources of error at the practice stage, you're also eliminating excuses you might have, like "My score on the practice was low because I didn't eat before the test". (CAUSAL ASSUMPTION, you guys) Once you've eliminated these excuses, you can pinpoint the true sources of error and work to fix them before exam day.
The Quantitative Section
Math! The scientists in the audience are probably nodding sagely about now. "Ah, yes. Math. I've heard of this." Lots of trained scientists do find this test fairly easy - there's a reason it has a much higher average score than the Verbal section. But you do have to keep in mind that this is stuff you probably haven't seen since grade 10 or 11. No calculus, no logs - basically? You're dealing with trig, basic geometry, and algebra. The annoying thing of it is, though, that it's a multiple choice test, formulated expressly to screw you up. Say the answer's A. Forget a negative sign? You'll get answer B. Write a six instead of an eight? You'll get answer C. It's ridiculously tricky, and you may find yourself flailing away at questions you know you understand, while your fifteen-year-old self watches and weeps. If the GRE folks were looking for a way to equalize this part of the test (so that it was just as weird and arbitrary for both scientists and non-scientists), they did a pretty decent job. Scientists have the advantage of experience with the logical concepts involved, but are more likely to get tripped up by solutions that seem intuitively correct. Non-scientists may not have worked with this material in a long time, but they are less likely to get dinged by the solutions that are meant to play on assumptions they've never had to make. It's a very silly section.
You've got 45 minutes for the math section, and there are 28 questions - do a little math (haha) and call it about two minutes per question. USE YOUR SCRAP PAPER. I cannot emphasize this enough. You are writing an exam in a freaky little room with a computer featuring state-of-the-art 600x480 resolution while a video camera is tracking your every move and a dude keeps walking down the aisle and making sure you're not cheating. Under those conditions you do not want to assume that you can calculate 1 + 1 in your head. Do it on paper.
The good news is that, unlike for the verbal exam, there aren't questions that are gonna take waaay longer than others. Some will be more difficult, or require a bit more thinking, but the baseline timing's about the same for all of them. Did I mention that you're not allowed to go back and change your answers?
A bit about the Computer Adaptive Testing: the GRE folks are scrapping this idea, but if you're writing before August 1, 2011, you're still going to see the end of this little experiment. The idea is that, instead of throwing you a bunch of questions and using your raw score to figure out your score out of 800, they give you one question, wait for your response, and give you the next question based on that response. If you screw up question 1, they give you a lousy base score and an easier second question. If you do well on that one, your base score improves (by a lesser amount), and you get a harder next question. And so and so forth. The idea is that it'll zero in on your true score.
That said? One of the biggest mistakes you can make on this section is trying to second-guess how the CAT is positioning your score. If you get a series of easy questions, that doesn't mean you just screwed up big time. It could be that these are just the questions you happen to know the answers to. Seriously, it sometimes works out that way! There's a theory going around that more perms-and-combs/probabilities questions indicate a higher score, which is possible - in both practice exams and the real thing (grades of 790, 800, and 790 out of 800), I saw a lot of probability questions. But hey, don't try to second-guess the CAT. Let it work its magic.
The only thing you need to know about the CAT is that the adaptive part of it means you can't go back and change an answer. Once you're done, you're done. This is why it's so important to run the official PowerPrep practice exams - they have the computer-adaptive quality, and give you the real experience of the adjustments and no-going-back. Timing is tricky, and you'll have to find a balance as you go. You should also keep in mind that the earlier questions play a bigger part in determining your score, so you can spend a bit of extra time on those, and even guess on the last few if necessary (leaving them blank will penalize you more than a wrong answer). It's also good to practice because you'll get a feel for how long the easy versus the hard questions take you. If you hit a tricky one, maybe you can give yourself an extra two or three minutes on it, because you know you made up the time earlier.
Another note about the CAT: it is on a computer. You can't write on a computer. Well, you can write on a computer, but they frown on it. If you're working with a book or a print-out, don't write on the book or the print-out. Get in the habit of writing on your scratch paper. This includes underlining, highlighting, whatever. Just don't touch anything but your scratch paper.
There are three types of questions in the quantitative GRE: charts, problem solving, and quantitative comparisons. Chart questions will simply slap a chart on the screen and ask you to start eyeballing numbers, usually to do with percentages (if A is combined with C, what percentage is that of B?). Problem solving questions will ask you a word problem and give you five possible solutions. Quantitative comparisons will normally have a little blurb, then show you two quantities from that blurb and ask you which one's bigger. There are four options: A is bigger, B is bigger, they're the same, or (this is the killer) it's impossible to tell based on the information provided.
For all of those question types, you'll want to write "ABCDE" on your scratch paper (or just "ABCD" for the comparison questions) and cross off the answers you've eliminated. Seriously, do this. It's very easy to get confused and click the wrong button if you're looking at .002 and .0002. A few tips: if a problem is asking for stuff involving x and y or whatever, make up numbers that meet any required conditions, plug them in, and see what happens. If you're doing a quantitative comparison question, do it a few times with different numbers to make sure the answer's not "it's impossible to tell".
Say you're doing a quantitative comparison question, and it tells you that x > 0 and y < 0, and the two quantities you're comparing are |x| + |y| and |x + y|. (Remember absolute value signs? They make whatever's inside them positive.) Pick your numbers - say, x = 2 and y = -2, which satisfy the conditions above. Then |x| + |y| = |2| + |-2| = 2 + 2 = 4 and |x + y| = |2 + -2| = |0| = 0, so A is bigger than B. We can eliminate the option saying that B is bigger than A, since that's obviously not true, and we can also eliminate the option saying they're equal. But is there a chance that what we just showed isn't always true?
Now's your chance to use some weird numbers. Try x = 10000 and y = -1. Try x = 1 and y = 10000. Try x = 1/2 and y = -1/2. Convinced? Good. The answer is that A is always bigger than B.
Mathy folks, I know it's tempting to start breaking out the complicated proofs and whatnot, but you are on a tight schedule, and besides, the GRE is specially formulated to trip you up. So in algebra problems, it might be easier to replace all the given values of x into the question than to simplify the equation itself - if you try to actually do the algebra, you might miss a negative sign, which they anticipated, and pick the wrong answer. If you're just plugging numbers in, you're less likely to screw up - and even if you do screw up, your solution won't be one of the ones listed, since you're working backwards. It's frustrating to do the questions this way, because it tests none of your mathematical ability, but that's just how it's gotta be. Good rule of thumb: if it seems complicated, you're missing an obvious step. Try simplifying, or pulling things out of brackets. Pretty much the most you will ever have to do for these questions is multiplying two two-digit numbers. (Of course, if you can't find the trick, it could be a lot more complicated - and that's why the following resources are so awesome. The more practice you have, the easier it is to find the trick.)
For this section, I had three main resources, all of which were immensely helpful:
And that's about as far into the quantitative section as I can get without breaking into more examples. Do those three things above, and you'll be more than fine. Stay calm, focus on what you know, and eliminate as many answers as you can - even if you have to guess, in the end, at least then you'll be improving your odds. Heehee, odds. Because it's the math section.
Okay, never mind.
The Verbal Section
Oh, verbal section. Oh, verbal, verbal section. To their credit, the GRE folks seem to have realized that they screwed up on this one, which is part of why it's changing up so much in the post-August-1 exam. This is almost 100% a test of your vocabulary. Do you know the difference between "venal" and "venial"? Do you know that the adjective "Catholic" also means "all-embracing"? You'll probably do well. But just as the math section is set to screw with the preconceptions of the experts in the field, this part is set up to mess with people having prodigious vocabularies by using archaic definitions and by doing everything except coming straight out and asking you the definition of a word. Someone might know full well that "obstreperous" means "noisy and stubbornly defiant", and they'll hit an antonym question, see the word "cocky", and immediately hit that instead of, well, an antonym. It's a bit brain-bending.
There's not a lot you can do on this one except improve your vocabulary. In spite of the arbitrary nature of the test, and probably quite by accident, this is the most valuable gift studying for the GRE gives you. A richer vocabulary is an excellent, excellent thing to cultivate. And there are about twenty billion wordlists online to help you out on this section.
There are four question types on the verbal section, for a total of 30 questions in 30 minutes. One minute per question, right? Nah, not quite. This is where the CAT gets really annoying: not all questions in the verbal section are created equal, and some will take considerably longer than others. It is very difficult to pace yourself on this section of the test, and all you can really do is practice.
The first question type is the aforementioned analogy question. Easy-peasy! They give you a word, you pick the word it's most opposite to. Best way I've found to do this one is to not look at the choices, and come up with your own antonym, even if it's something like "kinda not so noisy and willing to go along with stuff". Whatever. Write it on your scratch paper. Then read the options and see which is closest to your definition. If you screwed up and interpreted the word as a verb instead of a noun, or vice-versa, you'll see it at a glance once you look at the possible solutions, and can then reconsider your antonym before comparing.
We'll do an easy example, modified from the MajorTests.com source below.
PROCLIVITY
Okay, without looking at the possible answers, you can write down an antonym for this one. "Proclivity" means "tending towards", right? So the opposite would be "not tending towards". Let's check the answers.
a. distance
Okay, "distance" doesn't mean "not tending towards". Kill it.
b. obloquy
Okay, maybe you don't know this one. If in doubt, leave it for now.
c. sterility
"not tending towards"? Nah, not quite.
d. secrecy
Nope.
e. disinclination
"not tending towards". Hmm. "not inclined to". Hmm. This looks perfect, does it not? Perfect enough to cross off "obloquy" (which, by the way, is strong criticism/verbal abuse in public) and pick this answer, which is the right one. Yaay!
It seems tedious, but it's worth actually doing this every time. Waaay harder to slip up this way. The verbal section is annoying enough at tossing you words you've never seen before. If you're gonna lose marks, lose 'em for something like that and not a careless mistake.
The second question type is the always popular analogy question. These are the ones that go "A is to B as C is to D". I used to be appallingly bad at these, until I clued in to a very simple strategy: write a sentence containing the first two words. Apply it to all your possible options. The sentence that sounds best is the right one. Suddenly, analogy questions are really simple.
CONSPICUOUS :: VISIBLE
"Conspicuous is to visible", eh? What sort of sentence could you construct that includes these two words? Don't make it too complicated. "Something conspicuous is easily visible." Write it down. (Sometimes it works better to use the second word earlier in your sentence - just keep in mind that the order matters when you look at the possible answers!)
Try the options we're given: "sensual : audible". "Something sensual is easily audible"? I will refrain from making the obvious sex joke (not really) and say probably not. "irrevocable : changed". "Something irrevocable is easily changed"? Quite the contrary. "elastic : stretched". "Something elastic is easily stretched" makes a lot of sense. "ignominious : denounced"? "Something ignominious is easily denounced"? Well, no, not really. Kinda. "sensitive : felt". "Something sensitive is easily felt"? Nope. So the third one is the best answer! Sometimes it's not this obvious, and you'll have a couple that kind of seem to match the initial relationship. In that case, just create sentences for all your remaining options and see if you can plug the initial words into them.
The third question type is sentence completion - fill-in-the-blanks. Plugging all the possible answers into the sentence and reading to see which feels better is a decent approach, but it's still quite easy to get tripped up: the best way to verify if something is correct is to compare it to something concrete, as we did with the sentences and the antonyms above. Thus, before reading the possible answer choices, you should try to fill in the blanks with plausible words. (if you can't come up with words, try positive or negative signs to denote a word with a good or bad connotation). Then run through the list of possibilities for the first blank, find however many kinda match your word, and eliminate the rest by comparing the second blank to the word you came up with for it. Bam! Done.
The fourth question type is annoying in that it's a break from the other three types, and it's also a whole lot more time consuming. Yes, folks, there's reading comprehension on this here test, usually three passages of varying length. I've heard so many different strategies for RC. Princeton's big on reading first, jotting down notes as you go, and then looking at the questions. I had a fantastic teacher who swore by reading the questions first - and even trying to answer them! - before reading the text, and I sort of regret not going with that approach this time around. Broad, sweeping generalizations are usually wrong and can be eliminated from the get-go. Statements calling the author "disinterested" or "apathetic" are usually off, too. Apart from that, though, reading the questions first gives you a vague idea of what you're looking for as you skim the passage. Don't let yourself answer any of the questions until you're totally done reading, though - the GRE often includes passages where someone states one point of view, but ends up refuting it by the end. That's about all I can tell you, advice-wise - a lot depends on how fast you can read, and how well you can absorb what you've read. At least one of the passages will be full of incomprehensible jargon - don't get caught up in trying to understand it. My test had one really annoying question that assumed I was able to keep straight five different six-syllable names of micro-organisms, but generally they're more concerned about whether you can come away from the passage with the big picture.
So... practice! That's the best plan. My resources for this section were:
Basically, this is the section where I felt I could have improved my score with more vocabulary studying. This is probably where you're going to want to put a lot of your study-time.
A Few Words About Scores
Both the quantitative and verbal sections are scored out of a possible 800, and the scores are generally taken separately. The average score for the verbal is usually around 450 for the sciences and 550 for the humanities, and the average score for the quantitative is usually around 720 for the sciences and 550 for the humanities. The scores for the verbal section fall on a bellcurve. The scores for the quantitative section? There's a bell curve, and then a spike at 800. About 3-6% of people each year get 800 on the quantitative. Compare that with the verbal, where only 3-6% of people score 690 or higher. Identical marks on the verbal and the quantitative mean your verbal grade is much more competitive than your quantitative grade - a 500 puts you at the 62nd percentile for verbal, but only the 28th percentile for quantitative.
So what's a good mark on the GRE? Depends on what you're going for. If you're shooting for, say, MIT in the sciences (ahem), you're going to want 780-800 on the quant. Keep in mind that the GRE is one teensy little part of an admission board's decision-making process - when I say you want 780-800, that doesn't mean you're going to be admitted automatically. It just means that if you're rejected, it's probably not gonna be because of your GRE. If you're going for humanities at Princeton, you'll probably want at least 650 on the verbal. Second-tier schools have somewhat lower expectations, third-tier schools still lower - but some will surprise you and have strong cutoff points beyond which your application goes straight into the trash. Inform yourself.
So if you're a Classics major, does that mean you can have a bad quant mark? If you're an engineer, does that mean you can get away with a bad verbal score? Yes and no. The average verbal score for entering a scientific program at MIT is probably more like 550, which is quite attainable. But think about it - most of the people coming in are going to have quant scores around 800. Great, you can all do tenth-grade math. How are you going to distinguish yourself from them? If you have a well-balanced score, it's going to be way more impressive than an 800Q and 550V. Don't give 'em any excuses to throw your application out.
Wow, that was long. Um. Hope it helps? After some hesitation, I've decided to keep this post unlocked, so if you have friends taking the test, feel free to link them in this general direction if you think it might be helpful.
Also, no matter whether you agree or disagree with those tips, please let me know what you think in the comments! I'm fascinated by the way people learn, and it would very cool to compare notes on this.
If you're taking the GRE, or remotely considering taking the GRE, this might be helpful. If not, I hope it's at least somewhat entertaining.
My situation, right up-front, so you can decide how much to trust me on this: I took the GRE with two weeks' notice, studied in the evenings when I wasn't at school, and missed a few days here and there. I paid $40 for one guidebook (more on that soon), and apart from that, it was all free material online. I'm a scientist in my first year of a Master's degree, and I haven't taken a class in the Humanities since high school. I scored 790Q and 760V, and haven't heard back yet about my analytical writing. Some things have to be kept vague because of the non-disclosure agreement I signed prior to my test.
First and foremost, you'll get a lot of people telling you that there's no way to improve your score substantially on the GRE, which would be true if it were a genuine test of your current ability to handle graduate school. Since it is, in fact, the quintessentially arbitrary standardized test, it tests nothing more than your ability to take standardized tests, which is definitely a skill you can cultivate. Here's a quick rundown of the test prior to August 1, 2011:
1. An analytical writing section, graded out of 6 with half-point increments,
and, in any order:
2. A mathematical section, graded out of 800 with ten-point increments, and
3. A verbal section, graded out of 800 with ten-point increments.
You're also likely to see some sort of experimental section in which the GRE folks test new question types. This section doesn't count toward your grade, but it may or may not be marked as such, so if in doubt, just assume that every section is important and do your best on all of them. I got an additional essay question at the end of mine, marked as experimental, but there was the added incentive of a chance to win $250 (which would exactly cover my test fee and the cost of the one prep book I bought), so I definitely stuck it out through that.
There's a ten-minute break between section one and the last two sections; the whole test takes about four hours. If you need extra breaks, or special permission to bring food into the testing center for health reasons, there's an application form you can fill out on the official GRE website. You're also allowed to leave the testing area for a brief break at any time (although this rule may vary depending on the testing center), but the clock keeps ticking, and you'll probably find you're pretty tight for time on this one - I'm the sort of person who's always the first to finish exams, and my fastest time for completing a section left me with only a minute or so to spare. I'll talk briefly about each section, and give some advice for studying on each.
The Analytical Writing Section
This section currently consists of two essays: the issue essay and the argument essay. Both are pretty dang straightforward, and knowing you, flist, you'll do very well on these with little preparation. The best advice I can give is to time yourself doing these at least twice, to work on your time-management accordingly (for instance, I found that if I did five minutes of prep, thirty-five minutes of frantic typing, and five minutes of proofreading, I could come up with 700 words that didn't make me want to bury my head in the sand - but you might have another strategy that works better for you). Keep in mind that the admissions committees for all universities that receive your scores have the right to request to read these essays, so they're not just getting crunched up by a machine that spits out a number and destroys the rest.
You have 45 minutes to do the issue essay, and you're given a choice between two topics. The complete pool of topics from which these two will be selected is actually available here, so you can read through and get a feel for them. The point is to express your opinion on a given issue, so you want to be able to have a position that can be summed up in a pithy statement, but you also want to show the breadth of your understanding of the issue by acknowledging the validity of the opposition. Using absolutes is probably not a good plan, because using words like "always" or "never" makes it very difficult to show that you so much as acknowledge the existence of a second side to the issue. It is, of course, fun to point out other people's hyperbolic statements - going the route of "So-and-so argued that censorship is unequivocally bad because blah blah" is probably smart, because the use of examples? Always a good plan. Keep in mind that the graders for these exams are typically graduate students - it might warm the cockles of their hearts to see the odd literary reference thrown in. Showing a little variety can be nice as well - as an example, I quoted both Isaac Newton and Arthur Conan Doyle in the same paragraph of my essay.
If you're freaking out, going "Does this mean I have to go memorize pithy statements spoken by anyone remotely awesome so I can use them as examples?", well, you can if you would like to? It would probably be fun at parties. But I think you'd be surprised at how many handy little aphorisms you've picked up over the years. You don't have to quote literature or famous folks, either - if the topic has to do with the power of the media to influence public opinion, you could mention the racially biased coverage after Hurricane Katrina, for instance. If you want a strict format, think back to high school and go for something like this, which is approximately what I have in mind when I write an issue essay:
Paragraph One: Intro. Bring in a 'hook' of some sort: your strongest example, in descriptive language. Don't worry about flirting with cliché - the effort at doing something a little different will be appreciated, and besides, we're going for substance over flair, here. Describe the issue stated in as neutral terms as possible, and then take one side of it quite firmly, using the same language as in the prompt to make sure you're on the right track. Your side of the argument is your fortress, and you will now throw things at it to see how well it holds up. Make a reference to the opposing point of view, but restate that you believe the advantages of your position outweigh the disadvantages of the opposition, and segue neatly into-
Paragraphs Two-Sixish: (I will note here that I type very, very quickly and don't give myself time to edit or think about what I'm writing until the end - if you're more given to careful deliberation, two or three paragraphs here will probably be fine.) Organize based on example. If you're looking for ways in which the past shapes the future, talk science, politics, literature, art. Four paragraphs right there. Move quickly - edit if you have to, but you're going for speed here, and the more ideas you can get down on paper, the better. This is a race against the clock - if one idea or sentence just isn't coming together, scrap it and move on. I should also note that the GRE sample exams feature an essay that was actually incomplete (it cuts off mid-sentence), but still scored a perfect grade because there was so much quality content involved. Get your ideas on the paper. This is not a test of how beautifully you can communicate your ideas - it's a test of how well you can form an opinion, attack it, and defend it in forty-five minutes. Take that attack-defend approach - state an example that supports your position, come up with a counterexample or opposing argument, refute that argument, and move on. Your goal is to prove here that you've given it a lot of thought, and that, in the final analysis, your opinion is still the most valid. (And yes, you'll probably find yourself defending opinions you don't actually hold - even if you truly feel that X is right, it might be easier to prove X wrong in forty-five minutes. All part of the artificiality of the test.)
Final Paragraph: This is your victory lap! You should have about five to ten minutes left on the clock at this point. Restate the issue using the prompt's language, restate your position, and summarize the pros and cons of that position, ending with an "in the final analysis, my position is the awesomest" sort of idea. If you're really awesome, you'll come up with some sort of final sentence that ties in perfectly with the 'hook' back in the first paragraph. And your grader will weep tears of joy and give you all the very best grades.
GRE training books for this part of the exam are often aimed at folks who have much less experience with writing than you bloggers do, so you get a lot of "'however' is a transition word that enables you to change the tone of your sentence" and whatnot. If you think this sort of advice would be helpful, or if you have a tendency to freeze up on exam-type essay questions, the one book I used for preparation was the Princeton Review's "Cracking the GRE", and they had quite a substantial section at the back that focused on teaching you to write these essays in a formulaic way. If you've ever suffered from exam anxiety, you know as well as I do how important it is to have something simple and formulaic to fall back on in case of emergency - that's a good plan B. Always, always have a plan B. Keep in mind that a straight-up application of their formula isn't likely to earn you more than a "meh" sort of mark, but if that's all you need? Go for it. (Note that the analytical writing section is often considered to be less important for native English speakers - it's mostly a quick-and-dirty measure of your ability to string sentences together in English.)
Second is the argument essay, which has a thirty-minute time limit. This one's fun, and is ridiculously easy to structure if you've ever read an LJ post you disagreed with. No choices here - you're given a short paragraph (you can see the pool of topics here) containing an argument, usually presented as a letter to the editor. The argument will be seriously flawed. If you don't see flaws in the argument, read it again. And again. Pretend it's an LJ post by someone you really, really dislike. You know, when you just have to go in and nitpick every little assumption they ever made in a really passive-aggressive way? Yeah, that's the one.
Make a list of the assumptions being made, here. There are a few different kinds of assumptions, and this is where people with formal training in the field of logic or statistics are gonna have a field day. Probably the most common assumption is the sampling assumption you might remember from your Stats 101 class - a small subset of a population experiences X, so they must all experience X. "My friend had terrible service at this restaurant, so the next people who visit there will also get terrible service.": this one doesn't acknowledge the fact that hey, man, your friend's kind of a jerk. Another is the causal assumption - A causes B, and therefore B cannot exist without A (and nothing else causes B, either). "I always feel tired when I jog at 3AM, so running must make me sleepy.": this one doesn't acknowledge the fact that you are awake at 3AM, which may have more to do with your drowsiness. A third is the analogy assumption - I was able to do A, and because A and B are sorta similar, I should be able to do B as well. "I aced the SATs without studying, so I'll be able to do the same with the GREs as well.": this one... well, okay, so you probably could, for all I know. You rebel, you.
Keeping these assumptions in mind, go back and read through your topic. Make a list on your scratch paper of all the flawed assumptions in the argument. Now you're ready to start. As I said before, think of this as an LJ entry by your arch-nemesis. Someone hating on your OTP, someone trolling with ridiculously flawed political statements, someone refusing to own up to the huuuge omissions in their arguments. You've just been given a chance to take the wind out of their sails and gain the acclaim of the entire community. Forget "don't engage the troll". Forget "tl;dr". This is your moment of glory! Yessss.
Paragraph One: Very briefly restate the argument that's being made. What's its main purpose? What's it trying to convey? You don't want to get too bogged down at an early stage here - this is a short timeframe to write something in, so you want to get to your counter-arguments as quickly as possible. "The goal of this argument, which is to blah blah blah, seems sound on first glance, but makes several fundamental omissions and unsubstantiated assumptions, chief among them the blah, the blah, and the bleeblebloo." Bam. Done.
Other Paragraphs: Yeah, this is where you talk about the aforementioned blah, blah, and bleeblebloo. But hey, fun as it is to poke holes in someone's argument, with these arguments it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. You need something to make your essay stand out. How? Simple: you don't just want to destroy the heck out of that argument, you want to do that and go "of course, if I were on your side, I would've phrased it like this and everyone would've agreed with me because the argument would then be just that awesome, hahaha, can your puny mind even handle that". Think of this as the "if you had considered phrasing it in this way, I might've listened to you" stage of the LJ comment-battle. Or the other thing, with the evil laughter. Come up with ways to improve the argument - often, this is as simple as calling for an acknowledgement of the opposing viewpoint, or the release of additional statistics to clarify matters.
Final Paragraph: Victory lap again! This is the time to make your opponent realize just how thoroughly they've been pwned. You're probably running low on time at this point (typing all those "hahaha"s takes time, after all), so a quick summation should be sufficient.
And there you go! You're done the analytic writing section. The maximum possible score is 6, and average entry scores at universities in the States tend to hover around the 4.5 range for the humanities, and at around 4.0 for the sciences. I should add a disclaimer that I haven't received my scores on this section yet, so all of what I said above could be totally wrong. Follow this advice at your own risk. Anyway, lots of people find this section quite draining, which is why the GRE folks have kindly offered you a ten-minute break. Thanks, GRE folks! Even if you're not a break-taking sort of person, you should stand up and wave your arms around for a bit, jog in place, whatever it takes to get the blood flowing again.
How should you prepare for the analytic writing section? It's up to your faith in your writing abilities. For me, I only really found it necessary to do the two free PowerPrep exams on the GRE website (yes, it's worth downloading an XP virtual machine to run - it's exactly the same software used on the exam), holding myself to strict timing, and running them at the same time as the real exam: 3:30PM.
You should do practice exams at the same time of day as the real thing to get a feel for how hungry/tired you're likely to be. As to what you should do during the break, figure out what you need. If you tend to crash soon after an energy drink, don't drink it. If you get wobbly without eating during the break, bring a banana or something. Know your limits - you want to get the best possible grade on this thing, and by eliminating these possible sources of error at the practice stage, you're also eliminating excuses you might have, like "My score on the practice was low because I didn't eat before the test". (CAUSAL ASSUMPTION, you guys) Once you've eliminated these excuses, you can pinpoint the true sources of error and work to fix them before exam day.
The Quantitative Section
Math! The scientists in the audience are probably nodding sagely about now. "Ah, yes. Math. I've heard of this." Lots of trained scientists do find this test fairly easy - there's a reason it has a much higher average score than the Verbal section. But you do have to keep in mind that this is stuff you probably haven't seen since grade 10 or 11. No calculus, no logs - basically? You're dealing with trig, basic geometry, and algebra. The annoying thing of it is, though, that it's a multiple choice test, formulated expressly to screw you up. Say the answer's A. Forget a negative sign? You'll get answer B. Write a six instead of an eight? You'll get answer C. It's ridiculously tricky, and you may find yourself flailing away at questions you know you understand, while your fifteen-year-old self watches and weeps. If the GRE folks were looking for a way to equalize this part of the test (so that it was just as weird and arbitrary for both scientists and non-scientists), they did a pretty decent job. Scientists have the advantage of experience with the logical concepts involved, but are more likely to get tripped up by solutions that seem intuitively correct. Non-scientists may not have worked with this material in a long time, but they are less likely to get dinged by the solutions that are meant to play on assumptions they've never had to make. It's a very silly section.
You've got 45 minutes for the math section, and there are 28 questions - do a little math (haha) and call it about two minutes per question. USE YOUR SCRAP PAPER. I cannot emphasize this enough. You are writing an exam in a freaky little room with a computer featuring state-of-the-art 600x480 resolution while a video camera is tracking your every move and a dude keeps walking down the aisle and making sure you're not cheating. Under those conditions you do not want to assume that you can calculate 1 + 1 in your head. Do it on paper.
The good news is that, unlike for the verbal exam, there aren't questions that are gonna take waaay longer than others. Some will be more difficult, or require a bit more thinking, but the baseline timing's about the same for all of them. Did I mention that you're not allowed to go back and change your answers?
A bit about the Computer Adaptive Testing: the GRE folks are scrapping this idea, but if you're writing before August 1, 2011, you're still going to see the end of this little experiment. The idea is that, instead of throwing you a bunch of questions and using your raw score to figure out your score out of 800, they give you one question, wait for your response, and give you the next question based on that response. If you screw up question 1, they give you a lousy base score and an easier second question. If you do well on that one, your base score improves (by a lesser amount), and you get a harder next question. And so and so forth. The idea is that it'll zero in on your true score.
That said? One of the biggest mistakes you can make on this section is trying to second-guess how the CAT is positioning your score. If you get a series of easy questions, that doesn't mean you just screwed up big time. It could be that these are just the questions you happen to know the answers to. Seriously, it sometimes works out that way! There's a theory going around that more perms-and-combs/probabilities questions indicate a higher score, which is possible - in both practice exams and the real thing (grades of 790, 800, and 790 out of 800), I saw a lot of probability questions. But hey, don't try to second-guess the CAT. Let it work its magic.
The only thing you need to know about the CAT is that the adaptive part of it means you can't go back and change an answer. Once you're done, you're done. This is why it's so important to run the official PowerPrep practice exams - they have the computer-adaptive quality, and give you the real experience of the adjustments and no-going-back. Timing is tricky, and you'll have to find a balance as you go. You should also keep in mind that the earlier questions play a bigger part in determining your score, so you can spend a bit of extra time on those, and even guess on the last few if necessary (leaving them blank will penalize you more than a wrong answer). It's also good to practice because you'll get a feel for how long the easy versus the hard questions take you. If you hit a tricky one, maybe you can give yourself an extra two or three minutes on it, because you know you made up the time earlier.
Another note about the CAT: it is on a computer. You can't write on a computer. Well, you can write on a computer, but they frown on it. If you're working with a book or a print-out, don't write on the book or the print-out. Get in the habit of writing on your scratch paper. This includes underlining, highlighting, whatever. Just don't touch anything but your scratch paper.
There are three types of questions in the quantitative GRE: charts, problem solving, and quantitative comparisons. Chart questions will simply slap a chart on the screen and ask you to start eyeballing numbers, usually to do with percentages (if A is combined with C, what percentage is that of B?). Problem solving questions will ask you a word problem and give you five possible solutions. Quantitative comparisons will normally have a little blurb, then show you two quantities from that blurb and ask you which one's bigger. There are four options: A is bigger, B is bigger, they're the same, or (this is the killer) it's impossible to tell based on the information provided.
For all of those question types, you'll want to write "ABCDE" on your scratch paper (or just "ABCD" for the comparison questions) and cross off the answers you've eliminated. Seriously, do this. It's very easy to get confused and click the wrong button if you're looking at .002 and .0002. A few tips: if a problem is asking for stuff involving x and y or whatever, make up numbers that meet any required conditions, plug them in, and see what happens. If you're doing a quantitative comparison question, do it a few times with different numbers to make sure the answer's not "it's impossible to tell".
Say you're doing a quantitative comparison question, and it tells you that x > 0 and y < 0, and the two quantities you're comparing are |x| + |y| and |x + y|. (Remember absolute value signs? They make whatever's inside them positive.) Pick your numbers - say, x = 2 and y = -2, which satisfy the conditions above. Then |x| + |y| = |2| + |-2| = 2 + 2 = 4 and |x + y| = |2 + -2| = |0| = 0, so A is bigger than B. We can eliminate the option saying that B is bigger than A, since that's obviously not true, and we can also eliminate the option saying they're equal. But is there a chance that what we just showed isn't always true?
Now's your chance to use some weird numbers. Try x = 10000 and y = -1. Try x = 1 and y = 10000. Try x = 1/2 and y = -1/2. Convinced? Good. The answer is that A is always bigger than B.
Mathy folks, I know it's tempting to start breaking out the complicated proofs and whatnot, but you are on a tight schedule, and besides, the GRE is specially formulated to trip you up. So in algebra problems, it might be easier to replace all the given values of x into the question than to simplify the equation itself - if you try to actually do the algebra, you might miss a negative sign, which they anticipated, and pick the wrong answer. If you're just plugging numbers in, you're less likely to screw up - and even if you do screw up, your solution won't be one of the ones listed, since you're working backwards. It's frustrating to do the questions this way, because it tests none of your mathematical ability, but that's just how it's gotta be. Good rule of thumb: if it seems complicated, you're missing an obvious step. Try simplifying, or pulling things out of brackets. Pretty much the most you will ever have to do for these questions is multiplying two two-digit numbers. (Of course, if you can't find the trick, it could be a lot more complicated - and that's why the following resources are so awesome. The more practice you have, the easier it is to find the trick.)
For this section, I had three main resources, all of which were immensely helpful:
- The official math review - contains quick reviews of big topics, and a ton of sample questions. Work through these if nothing else. If there are sections that go by too quickly, you might have to do some googling to get up to speed, but this should all be stuff you've seen before.
- MajorTests.com's GRE review - contains a bunch of sample GRE-type questions, with great detailed explanations if you screw things up. I think these helped more than anything to prepare me for certain question types that come up again and again ("there are eight racers - how many different gold-silver-bronze combos are there?" and "two sides of a triangle have lengths blah and blah - which of the following is a possible value for the length of the third side?" are ones that come up a lot).
- The Princeton Review's "Cracking the GRE" book. I can't say I picked this book out of any particular loyalty to Princeton over any other GRE guide - it just happened to be the only GRE book on the shelf that applied to the pre-August 1 exam. Anyway, it has a ridiculous number of practice questions, and plenty of great tips that seem a bit counterintuitive at first. It also comes with a companion website and a DVD I never had time to touch - from what I hear, though, don't be discouraged if your grade on any unofficial practice exam is quite low. Keep in mind that these folks are trying to get you to pay $400 for their full tutoring service - it's in their best interest to make you think you're in trouble. The free PowerPrep software offered by the GRE folks themselves is the best indicator of your performance on exam day. (My quant marks on the PowerPrep practice varied from 790-800, and I got 790 on the real thing; my verbal marks on the practice varied from 710-750, and I got 760 on the real thing.)
And that's about as far into the quantitative section as I can get without breaking into more examples. Do those three things above, and you'll be more than fine. Stay calm, focus on what you know, and eliminate as many answers as you can - even if you have to guess, in the end, at least then you'll be improving your odds. Heehee, odds. Because it's the math section.
Okay, never mind.
The Verbal Section
Oh, verbal section. Oh, verbal, verbal section. To their credit, the GRE folks seem to have realized that they screwed up on this one, which is part of why it's changing up so much in the post-August-1 exam. This is almost 100% a test of your vocabulary. Do you know the difference between "venal" and "venial"? Do you know that the adjective "Catholic" also means "all-embracing"? You'll probably do well. But just as the math section is set to screw with the preconceptions of the experts in the field, this part is set up to mess with people having prodigious vocabularies by using archaic definitions and by doing everything except coming straight out and asking you the definition of a word. Someone might know full well that "obstreperous" means "noisy and stubbornly defiant", and they'll hit an antonym question, see the word "cocky", and immediately hit that instead of, well, an antonym. It's a bit brain-bending.
There's not a lot you can do on this one except improve your vocabulary. In spite of the arbitrary nature of the test, and probably quite by accident, this is the most valuable gift studying for the GRE gives you. A richer vocabulary is an excellent, excellent thing to cultivate. And there are about twenty billion wordlists online to help you out on this section.
There are four question types on the verbal section, for a total of 30 questions in 30 minutes. One minute per question, right? Nah, not quite. This is where the CAT gets really annoying: not all questions in the verbal section are created equal, and some will take considerably longer than others. It is very difficult to pace yourself on this section of the test, and all you can really do is practice.
The first question type is the aforementioned analogy question. Easy-peasy! They give you a word, you pick the word it's most opposite to. Best way I've found to do this one is to not look at the choices, and come up with your own antonym, even if it's something like "kinda not so noisy and willing to go along with stuff". Whatever. Write it on your scratch paper. Then read the options and see which is closest to your definition. If you screwed up and interpreted the word as a verb instead of a noun, or vice-versa, you'll see it at a glance once you look at the possible solutions, and can then reconsider your antonym before comparing.
We'll do an easy example, modified from the MajorTests.com source below.
PROCLIVITY
Okay, without looking at the possible answers, you can write down an antonym for this one. "Proclivity" means "tending towards", right? So the opposite would be "not tending towards". Let's check the answers.
a. distance
Okay, "distance" doesn't mean "not tending towards". Kill it.
b. obloquy
Okay, maybe you don't know this one. If in doubt, leave it for now.
c. sterility
"not tending towards"? Nah, not quite.
d. secrecy
Nope.
e. disinclination
"not tending towards". Hmm. "not inclined to". Hmm. This looks perfect, does it not? Perfect enough to cross off "obloquy" (which, by the way, is strong criticism/verbal abuse in public) and pick this answer, which is the right one. Yaay!
It seems tedious, but it's worth actually doing this every time. Waaay harder to slip up this way. The verbal section is annoying enough at tossing you words you've never seen before. If you're gonna lose marks, lose 'em for something like that and not a careless mistake.
The second question type is the always popular analogy question. These are the ones that go "A is to B as C is to D". I used to be appallingly bad at these, until I clued in to a very simple strategy: write a sentence containing the first two words. Apply it to all your possible options. The sentence that sounds best is the right one. Suddenly, analogy questions are really simple.
CONSPICUOUS :: VISIBLE
"Conspicuous is to visible", eh? What sort of sentence could you construct that includes these two words? Don't make it too complicated. "Something conspicuous is easily visible." Write it down. (Sometimes it works better to use the second word earlier in your sentence - just keep in mind that the order matters when you look at the possible answers!)
Try the options we're given: "sensual : audible". "Something sensual is easily audible"? I will refrain from making the obvious sex joke (not really) and say probably not. "irrevocable : changed". "Something irrevocable is easily changed"? Quite the contrary. "elastic : stretched". "Something elastic is easily stretched" makes a lot of sense. "ignominious : denounced"? "Something ignominious is easily denounced"? Well, no, not really. Kinda. "sensitive : felt". "Something sensitive is easily felt"? Nope. So the third one is the best answer! Sometimes it's not this obvious, and you'll have a couple that kind of seem to match the initial relationship. In that case, just create sentences for all your remaining options and see if you can plug the initial words into them.
The third question type is sentence completion - fill-in-the-blanks. Plugging all the possible answers into the sentence and reading to see which feels better is a decent approach, but it's still quite easy to get tripped up: the best way to verify if something is correct is to compare it to something concrete, as we did with the sentences and the antonyms above. Thus, before reading the possible answer choices, you should try to fill in the blanks with plausible words. (if you can't come up with words, try positive or negative signs to denote a word with a good or bad connotation). Then run through the list of possibilities for the first blank, find however many kinda match your word, and eliminate the rest by comparing the second blank to the word you came up with for it. Bam! Done.
The fourth question type is annoying in that it's a break from the other three types, and it's also a whole lot more time consuming. Yes, folks, there's reading comprehension on this here test, usually three passages of varying length. I've heard so many different strategies for RC. Princeton's big on reading first, jotting down notes as you go, and then looking at the questions. I had a fantastic teacher who swore by reading the questions first - and even trying to answer them! - before reading the text, and I sort of regret not going with that approach this time around. Broad, sweeping generalizations are usually wrong and can be eliminated from the get-go. Statements calling the author "disinterested" or "apathetic" are usually off, too. Apart from that, though, reading the questions first gives you a vague idea of what you're looking for as you skim the passage. Don't let yourself answer any of the questions until you're totally done reading, though - the GRE often includes passages where someone states one point of view, but ends up refuting it by the end. That's about all I can tell you, advice-wise - a lot depends on how fast you can read, and how well you can absorb what you've read. At least one of the passages will be full of incomprehensible jargon - don't get caught up in trying to understand it. My test had one really annoying question that assumed I was able to keep straight five different six-syllable names of micro-organisms, but generally they're more concerned about whether you can come away from the passage with the big picture.
So... practice! That's the best plan. My resources for this section were:
- The MajorTests.com verbal practice questions, as well as their vocab list and quizzes. The vocab's great - the verbal questions are a little off here and there, but you could do worse than to plough through these. I looked at them the day of the test, and they helped me get at least one question I wouldn't have, otherwise.
- The Princeton Review's "Cracking the GRE" guide. This was a fantastic resource for the verbal section, and I'm glad I spent so much time on it. Many, many exercises, but the text is really worth reading, and full of great tips and tricks. There are also a ton of oft-seen vocabulary words, including a list of lesser-known meanings. Highly recommended.
Basically, this is the section where I felt I could have improved my score with more vocabulary studying. This is probably where you're going to want to put a lot of your study-time.
A Few Words About Scores
Both the quantitative and verbal sections are scored out of a possible 800, and the scores are generally taken separately. The average score for the verbal is usually around 450 for the sciences and 550 for the humanities, and the average score for the quantitative is usually around 720 for the sciences and 550 for the humanities. The scores for the verbal section fall on a bellcurve. The scores for the quantitative section? There's a bell curve, and then a spike at 800. About 3-6% of people each year get 800 on the quantitative. Compare that with the verbal, where only 3-6% of people score 690 or higher. Identical marks on the verbal and the quantitative mean your verbal grade is much more competitive than your quantitative grade - a 500 puts you at the 62nd percentile for verbal, but only the 28th percentile for quantitative.
So what's a good mark on the GRE? Depends on what you're going for. If you're shooting for, say, MIT in the sciences (ahem), you're going to want 780-800 on the quant. Keep in mind that the GRE is one teensy little part of an admission board's decision-making process - when I say you want 780-800, that doesn't mean you're going to be admitted automatically. It just means that if you're rejected, it's probably not gonna be because of your GRE. If you're going for humanities at Princeton, you'll probably want at least 650 on the verbal. Second-tier schools have somewhat lower expectations, third-tier schools still lower - but some will surprise you and have strong cutoff points beyond which your application goes straight into the trash. Inform yourself.
So if you're a Classics major, does that mean you can have a bad quant mark? If you're an engineer, does that mean you can get away with a bad verbal score? Yes and no. The average verbal score for entering a scientific program at MIT is probably more like 550, which is quite attainable. But think about it - most of the people coming in are going to have quant scores around 800. Great, you can all do tenth-grade math. How are you going to distinguish yourself from them? If you have a well-balanced score, it's going to be way more impressive than an 800Q and 550V. Don't give 'em any excuses to throw your application out.
Wow, that was long. Um. Hope it helps? After some hesitation, I've decided to keep this post unlocked, so if you have friends taking the test, feel free to link them in this general direction if you think it might be helpful.
Also, no matter whether you agree or disagree with those tips, please let me know what you think in the comments! I'm fascinated by the way people learn, and it would very cool to compare notes on this.
