1600 Gre - Q:800, V:800

[peterv]

It is true... Waiting for AWA. Would expect a 6 .0 in Argument; certainly a 5.0, hoping for 5.5+ in Issue.

Material used for preparation:

* GRE Powerprep (The best: spent the weekend "immersing" into it)
* GRE Book (not "the Big Book" - the 10th edition). Did most of it. Not bad, but the tests are a tad old, and some questions are too easy if you go for top grades (if you check the difficulty of the questions at the answer keys, you'll find that only a handful of them are such that <10% of the total test population answered them correctly)
* Kaplan GRE Test. Need to do it, but make sure leave GRE Powerprep for last to get into the test mentality just before you take it
* Kaplan GRE Verbal: Good one.
* Kaplan GMAT & GRE: Did half of it - got bored after a while (being a Math undergrad may explain that)
* "Words" book (see Erin's list): The single best source for building your GRE vocab. He makes the occassional etymological error (for instance some Greek words he refers to as being Latin) but this is not exactly your major concern when preparing for the GRE...
* Barrons: Did the word list, but not all the thousands of words. I liked Kaplan's prep book a little bit more.

Publications to read for Verbal:
* The New Yorker
* Scientific American

Yes, there is WSJ, NY Times, the Economist, etc. You can read those too, but I liked the aforementioned magazines more. I think they better match the style and context of the passages you would expect to appear Verbal (geology, biology, astronomy, fine arts, literature).

Finally,
* New Oxford English Dictionary
* Roget's Thesaurus (the red and black one: edited by Kipfer (?))
* Fowler's usage of modern English.

Knowledge of any Romance language (Latin, Italian, French, ... - in that order - helps tons; I had done French in high school and currently started learing Portuguese). Greek is also useful for advanced vocab (words like bucolic, ascetic, laconic, panacea, epicurean, politic) but harder to learn and less useful in non-GRE contexts... And since we're talking about language, using any of the following two German words in any essay - weltanschaung, gestalt - or any Latin phrase (in situ, in vitro, casus belli) in the proper context, makes you essay seem supercool and may help win over the reader.

Finally, both in my GMAT test a year ago (730 BTW, 6.0 AWA), and in the GRE test now, I got an experimental math section at the end. It is no secret that GRE is going to make changes to the test in Oct 2006, and increase breadth and depth in the Q section. It may add non-multiple choice questions (e.g you write the numeric answer to the question in a little text box). So, if math is not your strong subject and/or you come from a non-numerate discipline (English, the Classics, psychology, whatever) you may want to take the exam before Oct 2006.

Good luck guys!

[gre_gal]

hi peter
let me be the first to congratulate u on ur sucess...
can u recollect some of the qs u got on the test...itd be really useful to future testtakers
also,how difficult was the math?what were the topics u were questioned in?did u get normal dbn probs?harmonic progression?what were the statistic probs like?can u recollect any?
also,if there are any notes/strategies/tips u used which u think would be useful to others,could u upload them?
wishing u all luck in ur future endeavours,
gre gal

[indianspur]

hi pet.....congrats
what program are you applying to
and in which uni's?

[peterv]

Thx guys! I'm not applying this year. Thinking of Sept. 2006. The default would be PhD in Business. Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago are the schools of choice. But this is all very tentative at the moment...

Regarding the questions, I believe there is a confidentiality agreement we sign just before the test, where we pledge not to reveal any questions. I guess the ETS would have no problem for me to tell you the AWA topics I encountered, since they come from a random pool that is in the public domain anyway. But exactly for that reason, this wouldn't help you much I guess.

What I can say is that the spirit of the test is very close to the Powerprep software, as one would expect. For that reason, while I strongly recommend studying Kaplan and Barron's (with an emphasis on Kaplan), I would also recommend any prospective applicant to spend the last 2-3 days immersing themselves in the Powerprep software. If eventually you get into a rut and get the same questions again and again, answer a few questions wrong (during prep, NOT in the actual exam!!!) so that you get different sets of questions. It is a wild conjecture, but I my best guess is that the ETS has a *huge* test bank, out of which it takes a small proportion of questions (1%? 3%? 0.2%? - I frankly can't guess...) and uses them in its Powerprep Software to giving people a feeling for the real thing.

My feeling was the math was a little more difficult than the prep CATs (ETS, Kaplan), but I can't know whether this was indeed owing to inherent hardness or owing to the actual pressure of the exam. Time during prep tests seemed "infinite" to me for math whereas during the test I found myself hard pressed for time.

I cannot see how one can take the GRE and not get standard deviation and/or probability questions at some point in the test. They are part of the test objectives and I would guess ETS would ensure that all grad school applicants get tested for rudimentary familiarity w/ prob and stat. I am not sure what you mean by the term "harmonic progression". Do you mean sequence (sth like S = 1 + (-1)^2 + (-1)^3 +...)? Well, these are core in Math. Believe me, I'm a Math major and I've done sequences in oh-so many courses both in university and grade 12. Sequences are core math. I would doubt that ETS would want to let anyone pass thru its sieve, that would lack basic reasoning on sequences. But then I'm not an ETS spokesman - these are just my conjectures based on what I would do were I in their shoes.

Last, but not least, GRE (just like GMAT for that matter) is a politically-correct test. Just try 10 CATs in Powerprep and I could bet a relatively large monetary amount, that you would get one of the three RC passages in each test dealing with a topic on women or minorities (African American, Hispanic, First Nations). So, based on this observation, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a passage like this in the actual exam too. Also, notice the fondness of ETS in the Powerprep to choose its science passages from the fields of Geology, Biology, and Astronomy. If ETS wants to be fair to non-affluent students that can't afford any preparation material other than the Powerprep CD, then it would preferably present passages from those areas in the actual exam too...
(BTW, as per its web site, the ETS, by Oct 2006, is supposed to broaden the fields covered in RCs)

[manasi4gre]

peterv,
Firstly,congrats on getting the full score.

"It is no secret that GRE is going to make changes to the test in Oct 2006, and increase breadth and depth in the Q section".
--How did you come to know about it ?
--I couldnt find anything mentioned about this in the official GRE website.
--what other changes in the testpattern are supposed to take place?
--Is the change effective from 2006?

I would appreciate it if you could answer the ques. of mine.Thanks.

[peterv]

Thx manasi!

1. Go to www.gre.org
2. Click on "Educators"
3. Read item "Changes to the GRE General Test Being Investigated"

Quantitative section is going to become broader, deeper, and use more computer-related tasks (presumably non-multiple choice questions)

Verbal section is going to remove focus from vocab (to prevent emphasis on memorization), give more emphasis to RCs, broaden coverage of RCs (for instance, currently science topics are from Geology, Biology, Astronomy only - maybe they'll add Math, Comp Sci, Engineering, Medicine, whatever), and add "complex reasoning" tasks; I'm unsure what this last thing exactly means - maybe more variety in style of questions in RCs?

These changes (or similar ones) are going to be become effective Oct. 2006. I think the change in Quantitative is long overdue, since the 92nd percentile for an 800 score may not be discriminating enough for the needs of certain schools. For instance Princeton might want to know who is a 99% math guy and who is a 93% math guy when it comes to a Ph.D. in pure math; similarly, for MIT and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

[minud]

Hey peterV

Frst of all big time congrats on ur score

and thanks for informative post.......I had no idea too that GRE was going to change from oct 2006

[hoper]

Perfect Score!

[manasi4gre]

Originally Posted by peterv

Thx manasi!

1. Go to www.gre.org
2. Click on "Educators"
3. Read item "Changes to the GRE General Test Being Investigated"

Quantitative section is going to become broader, deeper, and use more computer-related tasks (presumably non-multiple choice questions)

Verbal section is going to remove focus from vocab (to prevent emphasis on memorization), give more emphasis to RCs, broaden coverage of RCs (for instance, currently science topics are from Geology, Biology, Astronomy only - maybe they'll add Math, Comp Sci, Engineering, Medicine, whatever), and add "complex reasoning" tasks; I'm unsure what this last thing exactly means - maybe more variety in style of questions in RCs?

These changes (or similar ones) are going to be become effective Oct. 2006. I think the change in Quantitative is long overdue, since the 92nd percentile for an 800 score may not be discriminating enough for the needs of certain schools. For instance Princeton might want to know who is a 99% math guy and who is a 93% math guy when it comes to a Ph.D. in pure math; similarly, for MIT and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

Thanks for sharing the info.,peterv.

[peterv]

Thx minud and hoper! Good luck with the exam!