GREedge

Dear Shan23 (and the other students who have expressed their opinions above), At the outset, thank you very much for your honest feedback & suggestions for GREedge.com. Customer feedback is the Holy Grail that everyone at GREedge seeks and it makes us happier when it is unsolicited. Based on such feedback, our content and R&D teams work continuously to improve the learning experience of students. Your suggestion on bookmarks is very well appreciated. In fact, a few students have suggested the same in the recent past. In addition to words, students usually like to bookmark questions, portions of notes, math formulae etc. Students have also suggested labeling while bookmarking (i.e. create labels such as ‘important formulae’, ‘difficult words’ etc). We have been collating all the feedback for some time now and both these features are currently in the software R&D phase and will be released in the near future for the benefit of all our students. It’s nice to know that you liked the Wordbank (word with definition, synonyms, usage, and antonyms at one place). One improvement to this which we plan to make shortly is “theme based wordlists”, since many students have expressed dissatisfaction with the alphabetical wordlists that they come across in most books. Here is a small sample of theme based wordlists: Word Classified These are currently available for frequently asked words in GRE. Work is underway to extend the classification to all the GRE words. You mentioned about non-GRE style questions in the Verbal section. We guess, you meant the questions in the ‘Guided Learning Section’ of the sessions. There is a very strong reason for including such questions. As you know, a GRE verbal question tests both ‘Verbal reasoning skills’ and a ‘strong vocabulary’. Unfortunately, many students do not possess a strong vocabulary due to various reasons. As a result, they struggle (especially with question types such as Analogy and to some extent with Sentence completion) as these questions test their vocabulary and verbal reasoning at the same time. A good approach to make the learning easier is to: 1.Get exposed to the words using the GREedge Wordbank. 2.Polish the understanding of words through interactive questions that emphasize more on the knowledge of the word rather than complex verbal reasoning. 3.Once the student has a fair understanding of the word, he/she can attempt GRE style questions on the word. Now that they possess a fairly good knowledge of the words, they can focus solely on verbal reasoning. This approach helps the student to develop the two skills (‘vocabulary development’ and ‘verbal reasoning’) independently, one skill at a time. The GREedge verbal sessions are designed along this pedagogy. a.Learn words in Wordbank b.Strengthen the knowledge of words through simple, interactive questioning. (There are a variety of interesting question types that make the student think about the word from different perspectives.) c.Finally, take a mock test containing GRE style questions based on the set of words learnt. Students spend time flexibly on steps a, b and c based on their learning preference and prior knowledge of words. Those with a strong vocabulary (like yourself) usually learn words in the Wordbank, then skim through step (b) and focus on GRE style questions. Those who are new to words find it beneficial to spend good time in (a) and (b) before moving to ©. The method thus offers flexibility to different kinds of learners and has been very popular with those who dread to memorize words from alphabetical wordlists. However, we do not agree with your point that the tests provided by GREedge are not adaptive. When you joined us and took your first diagnostic test, your scores in both the verbal & quant sections were 660, 660. Your scores in the actual GRE were 800 (Q) and 710 (V). Also, your score in the verbal test that you took just before your GRE exam was 760, which means we were able to predict your scores within a range of (+) (-) 50 points (a ‘tolerance’ level of less than 10%). This was true for all the tests that you took with us, so we don’t see how it couldn’t have been adaptive. In any case, we understand that your experience with GREedge was not ideal for you and would like a chance to set it right, at least for our other students. Considering the fact that you hold a Masters degree in Computer Science and appear to pay a lot of attention to User Experience design, we invite you to be a part of our Software R&D team and provide your inputs and suggestions – both from a technical expert and an end-user perspective. If that is not possible, you could indicate to us to be on our beta-committees - small teams of student-customers who review our product and lesson releases before these are commercially offered. CONTACT INFORMATION REMOVED. Hearty congratulations on a brilliant GRE score and best wishes for your academic pursuits! Team GREedge PSEUDO SIGNATURE REMOVED