adamb

On the first powerprep, i got a 1450 I think, second one I did worse, 1360 I think. That was before much of my preparation though. The verbal section contained pretty standard words, I think all of them were list words. Words like gainsay, verisimilitude, charade, cozen, furtive, credulous. The hard part was their actual relations with each other. The RCs were just like the ones I'd seen on the prep tests: I don't remember which order the questions came in, but two short passages (~30 lines) and a long one (~70 lines). The questions were the same old "what type of passage is this?" or "The author would most likely agree with..." or "Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?" One topic was on science, the others about literature. My strategy for the RCs involved trying to read them pretty fast, not bothering about missing some stuff, and then waiting till I saw the question to delve deeper into it. Usually the answer is contained within a small section of the passage, so just getting a feel for where stuff is in the passage and then going question by question into more detail when necessary worked best for me. For the analogies, one of the book strategies I used much of the time was eliminating answer choices with identical bridges. This came up a lot and really helped narrow things down. Other than that, I'd say just study the word lists (make sure you catch any secondary definitions they may have, not just the primary one!) And.. it looks you're fond of my favorite study aid. Worked for the weekend of cramming before the exam ;).

I was blown away by these scores, as it beat anything I got on any practice tests, PowerPrep or Barrons, by 90 or more. I started preparing about a month ago (I'm a true procrastinator!), going through practice section and practice tests over and over again until I gained familiarity with the question types. I then just studied a list of 4,000 words from a seemingly lesser known GRE book by NOVA. Their word list was better than others I had seen from the more major test books. The math section was considerably easier than any of the practice tests I had taken, the part with graphs was kinder, and the bar graphs didn't require any estimation: all the bars rested on the lines. I always was finishing the practice tests with less than 2 minutes left, and so it was absolutely essential to be familiar with the kind of shortcuts you can use in the calculations. There were a few times I just decided to go ahead and brute force it, but the less you do that, the better. The geometry questions were just straightforward applications of the basic geometry rules listed in all the books, and exemplified in all the practice tests I saw. As for the verbal section, I had 2, and can only guess I got lucky in which one was counted for the score. While taking the test, I thought I was not doing very well at all, as I felt unsure about a high percentage of the questions, especially the analogies and antonyms. Here the words I had studied didn't seem to be as important as the actual relationships and strategies for the question types. A little reasoning can go a long way on these. But then again, I read regularly and that helps a lot, especially in the dense RCs. Anyways, I had read posts on this forum in advance of taking the test, and just wanted to let people know that with some hard work (well..studying that much is way more than I'm used to!), a cool head, and some reasoning ability, you can definitely get a better score than you expect! :D Adam