nitesh100

Having been there and done that. I believe that there's no substitute for hardwork and smartwork. You should practice and relook at the kind of mistakes you are making. That's very helpful for improving your score

FWITW, the RCs in the gre verbal grail are very good..in fact, that's the best thing about the book. I found the rcs in manhattangre 5 lbs to be quite superficial and not very representative of the types that appear on the gre

Yes 1000 words should be enough unless your vocabulary is very bad..

Yes, i used princeton book initially too..was good for basics but not for the advanced stuff.

Got a 168 on Quant and 5 on AWA. Not happy with the AWA score but since it doesn't matter much to the schools, i think it should be okay

So I finally took the GRE yesterday and I'm still feeling light headed, thanks to my verbal score. While I was expecting to score in the 160s, a 167 was definitely a very pleasant surprise. Although I was very good in GRE Maths (I guess that goes for most engineers), GRE Verbal was really proving to be my nemesis. When I started my prep I was told by colleagues and experts alike to focus on vocab as the GRE vocab is really tough. Now I've always been good at mugging up so the first thing I did was cram the Barron's word list. Took me about 2 months to mug up almost all of the near 3500 words, but mug them up I did! Given this background it came as quite a shock when I scored a paltry 150 in my first mock test (Powerprep 2). While RC was definitely a problem coz I've never really been in the habit of reading, it was surprising that I was also making mistakes in Text Completion questions, and not because I didn't know the word meanings but because I couldn't properly comprehend the meaning of the sentence itself, especially in those long 3-blank TC questions. This was sometime in the end of Jan, and I spent the next 2-3 months only focussed on improving my comprehension skills. In addition to practicing RC passages, I also started doing a lot of general reading in terms of newspapers and magazines such as the Economist, the Hindu, etc. I strongly recommend that all of you who want to improve your verbal focus extensively on improving your comprehension skills. You will be surprised to see the impact this has on the so-called vocab questions (especially TC). Two books that I found very useful in my prep were the Manhattan 5 pound book and the Aristotle GRE Verbal Grail. The Verbal Grail probably has the best RC coverage of all the books out there in terms of both theory and practice passages. For vocab I really don't recommend mugging up 3000-4000 words. The only place where vocab actually helped me was in the Sentence Equivalence questions but they come the least on the exam. It's better to refer to a shorter list of high frequency words as available in the Manhattan or Aristotle books. For tests I used Manhattan and Powerprep 2 and found them very good. In fact my scores on the last 2 or 3 practice tests were pretty much in sync with my actual GRE score. Feels great to at least have one burden off my back. Now I'll take the TOEFL next month and then start working on my SoP. Wish everyone on the forum luck with their prep! Cheers.

The GRE test center staff is usually very strict with name matching-one of my friends was denied from taking the test because of this issue..i suggest that you call up the ETS helpline and find out whether you had entered your middle name or not

The best thing to do is to pick up 20 words from the list and learn then throughout the day. This way in around 3 months you should be done with a good number of words. Also start reading newspaper editorial daily.

So I finally took the GRE yesterday and I’m still feeling light headed, thanks to my verbal score. While I was expecting to score in the 160s, a 167 was definitely a very pleasant surprise. Although I was very good in GRE Maths (I guess that goes for most engineers), GRE Verbal was really proving to be my nemesis. When I started my prep I was told by colleagues and experts alike to focus on vocab as the GRE vocab is really tough. Now I’ve always been good at mugging up so the first thing I did was cram the Barron’s word list. Took me about 2 months to mug up almost all of the near 3500 words, but mug them up I did! Given this background it came as quite a shock when I scored a paltry 150 in my first mock test (Powerprep 2). While RC was definitely a problem coz I’ve never really been in the habit of reading, it was surprising that I was also making mistakes in Text Completion questions, and not because I didn’t know the word meanings but because I couldn’t properly comprehend the meaning of the sentence itself, especially in those long 3-blank TC questions. This was sometime in the end of Jan, and I spent the next 2-3 months only focused on improving my comprehension skills. In addition to practicing RC passages, I also started doing a lot of general reading in terms of newspapers and magazines such as the Economist, the Hindu, etc. I strongly recommend that all of you who want to improve your verbal focus extensively on improving your comprehension skills. You will be surprised to see the impact this has on the so-called vocab questions (especially TC). Two books that I found very useful in my prep were the Manhattan 5 pound book and the Aristotle GRE Verbal Grail. The Verbal Grail probably has the best RC coverage of all the books out there in terms of both theory and practice passages. For vocab I really don’t recommend mugging up 3000-4000 words. The only place where vocab actually helped me was in the Sentence Equivalence questions but they come the least on the exam. It’s better to refer to a shorter list of high frequency words as available in the Manhattan or Aristotle books. For tests I used Manhattan and Powerprep 2 and found them very good. In fact my scores on the last 2 or 3 practice tests were pretty much in sync with my actual GRE score. Feels great to at least have one burden off my back. Now I’ll take the TOEFL next month and then start working on my SoP. Wish everyone on the forum luck with their prep! Cheers.

Yes Brent is right. Around 1000 words is a must if someone is serious about scoring well on GRE . 500 would be good if your vocab is already strong and you know a lot of words

Hehe...350 pages was thick by my standards :D but i agree with you that the RC has been covered quite exhaustively..i'm getting a good hang of tackling different types of RC questions and loving it! Yet to start with the practice set though

Dude, you need to work a lot on your English(the usage of the word "acclaimed" is wrong).. apart from the ETS OG that you must have,the GRE Verbal Grail the best out of all the verbal books out there..really helpful especially for RCs.

Thanks for the link. Got the book today and seems quite thick in the first appearance..Looking forward to dive into it! :)

Can anyone direct me where to buy the gre verbal grail from in India..I really need this book as i'm not doing well on verbal and haven't been able to find this book in bookstores.. i'd really appreciate a quick response...