Ok. I was reading your thread and honestly I need your advice now!!!
I took the GRE and made a 360 on the verbal portion and a 620 on the quantitative. How on earth did you help your score so much?! I did the study books and the practice tests but I am not a reading comprehension and vocabulary kind of girl. I got the vocab cards and made it through the first 100 of them with about 400 left in the box. Do you think I should go through all of those vocab words memorize them to a tee and then retake it? What is your advice? How did you do it? I need help. I do not want to retake the GRE but after seeing how well you did on the retake I am inspired!!!
Thanks so much!
Jessie
Hello Jessie,
I was just very nervous when I took it for the first time and I knew that I wasn't going to score high. The intake process, small room, no windows, and 20 video cameras, and wanting to go home was overwhelming. I just wanted to see my score in the end. but I digress.
I had about 7 weeks before I took the exam again June but prior to my first exam I studied the materials everyday for about 8 months, 6-8 hours a day.
Vocabs:
I grouped the words together with similar meanings and memorized the antonyms along with it. This way you can memorize words much more.
For example. obdurate, obstinate, firm, ungovernable, intractable, headstrong, inflexible, refractory
All of these words don't have the same meaning but have similar relationships.
Sentence completions.
I sort of came up with a formula to do this and there is always a hint within a sentence next to blanks. If you are an avid reader this shouldn't be hard for you.
Reading comprehension.
The material they give you is very dry and boring. So, I concentrated on only few types of questions that it will most likely appear in the exam. Almost always you will see a question about author's main idea and something about the details in the passage. This way I will get some right and not all of them wrong. But don't just blind guess on all of the other questions.
Writing.
I, honestly, didn't have enough time to practice on writing since I spent most of the time memorizing vocabs and solving math problems. I have always been a C student in language arts and I knew that I wasn't going improve much on it; hence, the score of 3.
I, also, took courses at Kaplan. It will help you guess better.
Materials.
I bought all kinds of books for the exams but don't buy the materials from the same maker. The questions on practice exams are repeated.
Other tips.
I spent more time on first 15 questions on the actual exam whereas I didn't on the first time. If you can get first 10 to 15 right, then your score will be much higher.
Take practice exams as much as you can. I regularly took the practice exam at least twice a week.
Especially on verbal, do try to eliminate the wrong answers first.
Lastly, I had two cans of Red Bull before the exam to keep me going during the exam.
Are you retaking the exam this month or next month? I only ask because the exam is going to be different.
Best of luck.