BuzzLiteBeer

Last week I took my first GRE and it was a disaster: http://www.www.urch.com/forums/just-finished-my-gre/123640-1240-q660-v580-does-bad-luck-exist-200-points-lower-than-i-expected-overall.html In short, I got1240 (Q660+V580) when all my practice exams pointed towards a score of ~1400 (~Q750 V650). I was shocked and deeply depressed. But thanks to this thread: http://www.www.urch.com/forums/just-finished-my-gre/6688-practice-gre-tests-vs-real-gre.html I was able to realize that something was wrong and that my score did not make sense. I took the exam on Aug. 27th, so I immediately signed up to take it again on Sept. 4th My new score? 1450 (Q780 V670) This is a 210 point total improvement over the course of a week without further studying. The GRE is for the most part fair, but sometimes, you get royally screwed. Having a bad day can impact your performance. My total preparation for the GRE included an initial commitment of about 30-60 min./day study of vocab for two months before doing three weeks of intensive 4 hr/day math and verbal review. I used the following: Princeton Review: Cracking the GRE (Easy but good for initially getting into the groove of the GRE + good introductory tips) Barron's GRE (Great list of "must-know" vocab and good source of practice, especially for the quant section as these problems are more challenging than those of most other review books. Nova Math Bible (A must for those who want to score well in the quant. This is the most comprehensive review I have ever seen and presents difficult topics such as probability and permutations in the most easily understood formats. It also provide a good variety of practice problems at the end of each review and are categorized by difficulty from Easy to Very Hard. There are 2-3 errors with the text though so if something doesn't look right like this problem:http://www.www.urch.com/forums/gre-math/123770-unsolvable-problem.html don't panic.) PowerPrep: The only indicator you should trust for estimating GRE scores. If you are off from your PP estimate by more than 30 points on either section, you have a very good chance of doing better on a retake. Other Practice CATs: Princeton Review & Kaplan That's all. The morale of my story is this: it is possible to be unlucky on the day of the exam. So if all indicators point to a discrepancy between actual and practice scores, retake, retake, retake!!! This forum has provided advice, encouragement and insight for me throughout these very stressful weeks, so I'd like to say thanks to all of you. I will return to this thread if anyone has questions or want a more detailed account of my second GRE experience.

How off were from your practice GRE's? If you were off by a lot, then you may consider retaking with more confidence and a some time off to further review.

I agree. But I thought of it like this: Since F is in all subsets, it might as well not exist. So out of 5 numbers, how many subsets of 2 can you make? 5!/(5-2)!(2!) = 10

Most certainly, although if you are acing all the other questions you can afford to spend chunk of time doing it manually, although i wouldn't recommend it since that makes you prone errors. If you are lucky, you will not get a perm question, but they are definitely fair game.

I thought this was gonna be a trick question based on the title. Guess not.

This is extremely frustrating. I've been scoring between 740-790 for the last 2 months on quant practice exams because of careless miscalculations or misreadings of the problems. None of my errors are due to conceptual issues, which i probably why my score has not improved over the last few months. What is problematic is that even when I slow down and take the whole 45 minutes for the section, I still make these mistakes. Am I just careless by nature and should just deal with it? Or is there a way to reduce these errors?

How much time between your GRE's?

Jeezus...no one understands why I'm confused and clearly no one is even reading the question. I know that A=B=3 works, but the problem says that "A" and "B" are DIFFERENT, meaning "A" CANNOT EQUAL "B", so there is no answer.

You forgot to explain how A and B are DIFFERENT positive integers. Because as far as I'm concerned, the answer 15 only works if A=B=3. I'm not looking for an explanation of how to do the problem, I'm looking to see if I may have missed something where A is NOT equal to B and still yields an acceptable answer.

The costs of equities of type A and type B (in dollars) are two different positive integers. If 4 equities of type A and 5 equities of type B together costs 27 dollars, what is the total cost of 2 equities of type A and 3 equities of type B in dollars? (A) 15 (B) 24 © 35 (D) 42 (E) 55 So the Nova Math Bible explanation for this problem is that equity A costs 3 and equity B costs 3 yielding an answer of (A). This ignores the condition that A and B are different integers. AM I missing something or is this problem flawed? EDIT: After many replies that did not understand my question, I am assuming that people are not reading my replies, so I've updated the first post. It seems that no one understands why I'm confused and everyone thinks I am looking to the solution to the problem. I'm not stupid, I know that only (A) works. What I want to know is if other people agree that the problem is flawed. Clearly no one is even reading the question. I know that A=B=3 works, but the problem says that "A" and "B" are DIFFERENT, meaning "A" CANNOT EQUAL "B", meaning "A" and "B" cannot be 3, meaning there is no answer.

There is no way I can take it in October. I am in my last year of college and need to be applying to grad school immediately. On top of this fact, I must deal witht he GRE before school starts. The workload at my college is insane and this year I have a thesis for Chemistry, a senior project as part of my environmental studies requirement and 2 semesters of physical chemistry to deal with on top of other courses. If I fail to reach at least Q750 and V600, I will be giving up on my aspirations as a chemist and will try something else. I have done absolutely everything I can to prepare for the GRE and if the retake goes poorly, then I will know I am not cut out for grad school. I'm not super worried though since my practice runs have all been quite good and I'm confident this retake will not go badly (since it takes a large amount of bad luck to get get screwed as bad as I did). My academic background is this: I attend a liberal arts college in the northeastern USA (top 5, but I won't specify which school exactly). I have a 3.5 GPA overall GPA with a major in Environmental Chemistry. My other experiences include 3 summers of research and a student research award at a major analytical chemistry conference. I've done my grad school research and it seems that most candidates for the top schools in analytical chemistry have similar backgrounds and credentials. The only things left that I need to do are: GREs (with at least a Q750 V600), letters of reccomendation (I have two professors that I know will write solid recs...not sure about the 3rd tho), and a personal statement (this I have not even thought about yet).

The first quant question was a geometry question involving angles I think. It was one of those subtle ones where you had to look for clever ways to get to your angle. Admittedly, it wasn't that hard when I got home and tried to redo it, but on the exam, it can really throw you a curveball. Anyhow I got another hard one around number 6 or 7 that involved geometric progressions and then another one involving a permutation/probability combo problem. I think if I was able to stay calm, I might have gotten through a few more of these. I also forgot to mention that I did not get the last 3 problems. I only recently found out that there is a penalty for leaving blanks. This counter-intuitive considering that the AT has a penalty for guessing while the GRE ha penalty for NOT guessing. I think if I had been more calm and finished the exam I would have scored above 700, but nowhere near what I expected.

Sure, I'll go through my entire experience. I went in and started the exam feeling comfortable and confident, but still apprehensive and a bit nervous. The Issue task happened to be a topic I was comfortable with and the Argument task is easy as always. By the ten-minute break, I was pumped to destroy the rest of the exam...then came the Quant section. The very first question I encountered blew me away...there was no way that it was "medium" in difficulty (at least not for me). I encountered at least 3 questions I had to guess (after some POE) in the first 10 questions of the section. Needless to say, I totally lost my cool and choked on half of the questions after. By the time I was done and onto the verbal, my confidence had be checked pretty hard. The verbal felt fine , which is why the low score was also a surprise to me (I felt like it would be 600-620 instead of 580). I completely skipped the experimental and looked at my score. I knew I wouldnt do well on the quant, but 660?I was in denial for an entire minute and pinched myself in hopes that I was dreaming and this was all a big nightmare. What is interesting is that almost everyone on this forum scored within or close to their practice test ranges (especially with PowerPrep). See this thread to see what I mean: http://www.www.urch.com/forums/just-finished-my-gre/6688-practice-gre-tests-vs-real-gre.html Anyhow I just took another practice quant on 800score, which is supposed to be much harder than any GRE, real or otherwise. My score: 720. I will update this thread and the Practice vs. Real thread on the 4th of Sept. to see if I was indeed unlucky that day or if I'm simply a poor test taker under real pressure.

Ok, so I've been going through the Nova Math Bible and while I'm getting about 90% of all the practice questions right, the 10% I'm getting wrong are due to wrong methodology and all the problems have ridiculously elaborate algebraic explanations. Anyone else have this experience with the Nova Math Bible? Will I ever encounter questions of this magnitude on the actual GRE?

For problem 3, is it the smallest possible mean? Because choice D and E seem to work as well.

Here are my scores for the CATs I've taken from power prep and Kaplan: PPI - Q740 + V650 (Taken first a month ago) PPII - Q760 + V650 (Taken yesterday) KapI - Q790 + V610 KapII - Q710 + V640 KapIII - Q790 + V600 Actual: Q660 V580 (These did NOT reflect estimates from my practice exams) I posted this as its own thread a few days ago, but it has gotten no replies. Based on that fact and the fact that almost everyone here scored within their practice range might suggest I was unlucky. I'm retaking in hopes that that is indeed the case. I will update this once I retake the GRE.

Literally half the number of wrong Math answers I give are the result of careless miscalculations. Anyone know how to reduce these other than to "try harder"?

Ok, so I'm going over all the GRE Math using the Nova Math Bible. THis is the 4th review book I've consulted and all say that substitution is the surefire way to go if the algebra is too complex. Problem: subbing takes FOREVER. This is especially troublesome since most QC problems require subbing 1, -1, 0, and +/- Fractions. Should I hone my sub skills or my algebra?

Hi all, I just finished my first GRE exam and I was shocked at how hard the actual test was. Everyone was telling me that PowerPrep was pretty damn good at estimating scores, but this was clearly an exception. Here are my scores for the CATs I've taken from power prep and Kaplan: PPI - Q740 + V650 (Taken first a month ago) PPII - Q760 + V650 (Taken yesterday) KapI - Q790 + V610 KapII - Q710 + V640 KapIII - Q790 + V600 The good news (at least it seemed like good news) was that this was the range I needed to be considered for a top tier Analytical Chemistry program (along with a 3.5GPA from an elite liberal arts school, 3 summers of lab experience, a paper with second author, and a symposium award...which I think makes me at least worth a look I think.) Badnews: My score didn't really change after a month of intense study (I did make improvements over the entire summer, but my first diagnostic in June was a paper-based). I'm currently registered to take it again on Sept. 4 (not sure if this is right or if they will call me since my registration went through...I'm guessing once every "calendar month" means as soon as the month changes). Can I expect to have a different experience? Is there such thing as bad luck on the GRE? Or am I was I just lucky on all those practice exams?