cherubie

Please take a look at the "just finished my gre" section of this forum. There is more information in there than you'd want to read. Secondly, no offense, but if your grammar and writing is as bad as it is in your post, you need A LOT of work.

You can do this, or decide for yourself by taking both practice tests from Powerprep and see which one you do better in. Personally, I didn't want to take the new one. Even if your vocab is average, or below average, it's much easier to memorize words (in my opinion) than to "learn" how to interpret reading comprehension the way the test makers want you to. Plus, I read somewhere that the new one will still have vocabs involved, but they won't be out of context (so no analogies and antonyms). So it entirely depends on what type of verbal person you are. If you're a fast reader and is naturally good at RC's, go with the new one. If you're a slow reader (like me) and has a penchant for memorizing random facts quickly, go with the old verbal. As for the math, although I read that the new one is supposed to be easier, I highly doubt it. I believe that one of the reasons for the change is because to a lot of people, the GRE Quant is a joke. It's easier than the SAT, and it is not normally distributed. Based on the percentiles, wayyy too many people are scoring too high in math. So, the only way to correct for this is to make it harder and thus more people will fall in the middle range. Additionally, the new one will have a calculator. This is a bad sign, in my opinion. With the old one, once you see the concept, you can get the answer within seconds (except for those pesky graph questions grr). With a calculator, even if you know how to do it, just simply punching in the numbers will take longer than mental math. The current one may require you to do math such as 10% of 80. You can get that answer almost immediately. Imagine sitting there and typing (or clicking, whatever it may be) 82% of 14502. Another point to consider is right now there is a myriad of practice books/programs/softwares to prepare you for the CURRENT one. Although companies are already thinking ahead and will roll out prep books for the new one, undoubtedly, it is no way as comprehensive as the current one. Again though, I would suggest you take the new Powerprep and the old one, see which one you like better.

I would suggest you look into Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, US. Its cognitive science major has a heavy linguistics component, as well as a linguistics minor. Also, Hopkins Cognitive Science graduate program is ranked the best in the nation (just go to their website and you'll see what I mean). Additionally, what exactly do you mean by "linguistics"? You mention how you're studying several languages, but that alone is not linguistics. At Hopkins (as an undergraduate there), secondary languages are only a part of it, linguistics is more about the structure of a language, the breakdown of how language is processed cognitively (imagine studying language in terms of math and computer science). It isn't JUST about how many languages you know, and definitely more than just grammar or being able to speak the languages fluently.

Without knowing the program and degree you're after, I don't think anyone can help you. The schools you're reporting to don't necessarily have to be the ones you are applying to. It helps, since it saves you the money to report them later, but it's not binding or anything. In other words, it's not that big of a deal. After my exam, I was in such a daze I just typed in whatever Universities, from Ivy Leagues to my undergraduate to state schools. The schools won't reject or take you based on those scores alone, so you don't have to freak out. EDIT: One more piece of info. I don't know if you're taking your exam outside of the US (or if it matters), but you can search the schools based on location (state) as well as names during the reporting part.

I don't know if this is entirely true based on my GRE Diagnostic results from ETS. My first question was a level 4 (I assume 5 is the highest since I didn't get anything higher than 5), then the difficulty level kept fluctuating. At some points, I got 10 right in a row, but the level jumped to level 2 for some reason. Then I got 1 wrong and the next level was actually more difficult. From reading around, I notice that some people report seeing all level 4/5's for their whole exam. Additionally, I got #10 & 19 (out of 28) wrong and still got a 800Q. Maybe I was lucky and got the easier exam (even though ETS said all exams should be equal). I can't imagine a level difficulty of 5 for number 15 is worth less than a level of 3 for #4.

I personally didn't look through Kaplan's vocabs. However, there wasn't any strategy to that. I picked Barron's because I've read (ahem from here) that it's the most comprehensive one. In fact, Nova's GRE course has a 4000 word list, including many words not in Barron's. Ultimately, for the current GRE, you want to know as many words as you can, so the more words, the better. At a certain point though, we have to be realistic. Memorizing 3000 something words got me the score I wanted, so i didn't bother to go through other lists. However, if you already know a lot of Barron's, and have a lot of time until your test, it definitely won't hurt if you go through other lists too. As for math, I did Barron's, Nova (GRE course and bible) and Kaplan. As I mentioned, Kaplan was a waste. The only thing I learned from Kaplan was rate problems (i.e. if Bob mows the lawn in 5 minutes and Tom mows it in 10, how long will it take for them to do it together). But Nova also has a brief section on the exact same type of problems too. Nova's GRE course and bible are pretty much identical except for some "higher math" chapters in bible but not in the course book (permutations is one of them). For those graph questions, Kaplan and Barron's (and powerprep) graphs are nasty to look at- esp. Kaplan. I skipped over all those questions. If you don't have a particular phobia to math, and know how to make and read graphs, don't freak if you can't get those questions right in the practice tests. My graphs on the exam were all very clear and easy to read. Then for CAT's I did 1 Kaplan (the math was atrocious, I don't know how I got a 760Q), Barron's section timed math tests (they have repeats from their book, so the score may be inflated if you know all the book questions); and then most importantly powerprep.

On the powerprep software, the timer comes on and off if you click on the timer button at the left hand corner. Try clicking that see if the timer will come on. Also, like the other person said, do not leave anything blank. I had 3 minutes left for 2 math questions I think, and I semi guessed on the next to last one (even though I knew exactly how to do it if I had another minute) to make sure I won't get caught up and run out of time,

Just make sure that you REALLY look over at least the first 10 on the CAT. After the first 20, silly mistakes are fine. But I don't think you need to worry, most of the questions I had didn't have room for math mistakes cus little calculation was involved.

Disclaimer: I did NOT check for grammar and other errors, please don't criticize my writing as I wrote this in a hurry. This is my first time posting on here, but I've been checking out threads about study materials and reading success stories for a while. Hopefully, my experience/advice can help someone who is in the same shoes as I was just a week ago. My score: 800Q, 700V, ??AWA (only finished my test yesterday, didn't get it yet). #1 Advice: Stay Calm! Your nerves are the biggest speed bump between getting you and getting the score you want, and I'll let you know why below. Prep materials: Quant: Nova Math Bible, Nova Gre, Barron's, & Kaplan Verbal: Barrons, Big Book, powerprep When I first started studying, I didn't even know where to begin! I didn't really study for my SAT's or any of the other standardized tests (ACT & AP in the US) in high school, so I had no idea what to do. I kind of freaked out, peruse forums obsessively in search of "the best" study materials. Thanks to urch, I heard about the Math Bible (before this, I had only heard of Kaplan and Princeton). Okay, onto my experiences with them: Math Bible: First, if you don't have at least 1 solid month to read, do the problems, review, and redo the problems, don't even bother. It will only stress you out. This book is like a dictionary of all the possible math problems you can ever get on a given topic (okay...maybe I exaggerated just a little). I started my GRE study with Math Bible, which later turned out to be kind of a mistake. The problems in this book (other than the easy section) are on such a level where you need to know the very basics before you should even open this. I went through all the problems, then I took a random Barron's timed math section. Scored a 500-something. :eek: I couldn't believe it, I thought people in the forums said that "Bible" was all you need for a 800! Then I realized that because I was so caught up in doing the hard problems in Bible, I didn't even know the basics. I knew how to do random complicated stuff, but couldn't figure out things like side constraints of a triangle. Onto my next advice: Start with Barrons THEN go to Bible for quant unless you are very good at the basics already. When I say "very good", I don't mean that you can spit out formulas of areas or that you know your multiplication table. I mean that you are so good that basic math things are intuitive to you. Anyways, then I went back, redid Barrons, learned to train my eyes to recognize the simple things, THEN went back and did Nova again. At this point, I felt exhausted, I've gone through Nova TWICE. Meanwhile, I was also painstakingly memorizing Barron's vocabulary words. Let me make this clear: I don't read outside of my classes. I had enough work in college reading math and science text books, I couldn't care less for novels or things that didn't help boost my GPA. So let's just say that my vocab is where it was in high school. I didn't know most of the words in Barron's, and the ones that I did knew were common-sense type of words that any freshman in college would know. The one and only thing that helped me in memorizing these words are flashcards. They were a pain in the :mad:, but that was what worked for me. I spent more time writing the cards than to memorize them. I tried shortcuts, such as flashcards on the computer, listening to audio, but none of them stuck. I would know the word, then if I don't review it, it would be foreign to me again in a couple days. So whatever way works for you, do it, but you NEED to know those words. I didn't bother with the "most frequent" words stuff, I just went straight to Barrons and started from A-->Z. I truly believe that memorizing all those words was what made a difference between a 500 (or possibly 400) and the 700 that I got. All but about 3 words on the exam were words I knew, and WOULDN'T have known if it wasn't for those laborious hours of poring over flashcards. So that was pretty much what I did to prepare. You're thinking, "wait, how did you prepare for verbal?!". Well, that was my preparation- flashcards. Then I read about the Big Book, and how one MUST take every single test. I was determined to do so, but then after 2 tests I got tired and didn't care about the other remaining ones. My background: (Important if you want to see where I started, and whether I'm some kind of math/verbal whiz to begin with) -I didn't score stellar on my SAT's (1290). For my SAT's, I think I practiced some 5 analogies and like 2 pages of math problems then took them. Ended up with a 600-something in both -I DON'T have an extensive vocabulary to begin with. In fact, English is kind of my second language (I learned English at 5 years old). -I did NOT take a whole bunch of upper level math courses in college. I read somewhere on here that most 800Q people took upper level college courses. Nope, I took statistics (APed out of calculus) and don't remember a thing past p-values and the normal curve. -I'm in the sciences, but not in engineering, so non-engineers can still do well in quant. Anyways, my biggest advice other than stay calm, is to work through the math bible. Work through it until you never want to see those questions again. I did, redid, and then redid again, the math bible problems 3 times then one more time a week before my exam. The most important thing, while you're working through them though, and think to yourself, "how can I take this question and turn it into a concept?" I didn't redo the problems to memorize them in hopes they'd appear on my exam (haha which is about next to impossible). I redid them to make sure I understood the concepts so well that it was second nature to me. It worked obviously. On those hard/very hard questions, you won't get anything like them on the actual exam. My exam barely had any calculations, I think there were about 3 questions where I needed to do some multiplication and subtraction. So for those Nova problems that require half a page of math to do, don't worry about them. But you should understand the concept (CONCEPTS CONCEPTS CONCEPTS) behind them. The best example are the geometry questions. There are like 100 geometry questions on there, almost all of which 10x harder than what I saw on the GRE. HOWEVER, the fact that I did those problems until my brain melted, I can look at a figure and almost spontaneously spot what they (ETS GRE) want me to see. You should be able to look at those questions, and go straight to "what concept is this", not "what formula or strategy can I use". For Verbal, biggest advice is words words words (unless you're taking yours in August 2011). I didn't practice verbal outside of memorizing words mainly because after i was 3/4 done with my flashcards, I took a powerprep and got a 680 without even knowing what the verbal section looked like. I basically took the practice test thinking, "okay, let's see how well can I do with JUST a knowledge of the vocabulary." I got some questions wrong because I didn't know the word (note that I said I finished 3/4 of Barrons), they were in the S,T,W, etc sections of the word list that I hadn't studied. I don't think my strategy is the best for everyone. I don't think that vocabs alone will score everyone a 700. However, I come from a science-oriented background, and started reading science peer-reviewed journal articles since my high school days, so reading complex material and trying to figure out what the author wants to say is something I've been doing for quite a while.I don't suggest you running to Pubmed or anything and start reading random articles though if that's what you thought I was implicating. Okay, now my practice scores: let's say they were all over the place Kaplan- my first, non-serious one: 760Q 560V (these scores are approximate, as I can't remember the exact numbers in verbal) Powerprep1: 790Q 680V Powerprep2: 730Q 550V :eek: I freaked out after seeing the 550, (I will NOT let my flashcards effort go to waste!). Then I went back and realized that I got LESS wrong on PP2 than on PP1 in verbal. However, the questions I got wrong on the first one were in the last half of the section, and the questions i got wrong on the second one were on the first half. So it killed my score. I went back and redid PP2, this time very meticulous with the first half, and got a 690. So at this point, I was hopeful (but not confident) my score would hover somewhere around 700V & 750Q. For Kaplan's verbal score, I am sure it was because 50% of the vocabs on Kaplan were words that were not in Barrons. For analogies, I glanced over Kaplan's analogy section, and it kind of clicked after that. I didn't really "practice" them or anything. As far as writing: I just went over Kaplan's strategies and wrote one essay for PP2. Alright, gotta go to work now :crazy:. Please do ask questions if you have any! If it wasn't for Urch, I probably would've just based my studying off of Kaplan. (Oh, btw, Kaplan's math did nothing for me, I went through it in 2 days and never looked at it again).