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Corey

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Everything posted by Corey

  1. [ATTACH=CONFIG]7169[/ATTACH] Master GRE Quantitative Comparison with easy strategies! Tuesday, January 9th 7pm ET / 4pm PST / 12am GMT Complete Mastery of GRE Quantitative Comparison
  2. Hey cfrv93. One of the problems with using a dictionary is that you'll end up learning much more about words than you need to learn. Instead, you'll find it much more efficient to use a thesaurus, as you'll just see synonyms for words. This will help you improve your vocabulary in a very efficient manner. While the GRE is a reasoning test, a strong vocabulary base can be very helpful for attacking many of the text completion and sentence equivalence questions. Also, the GRE does have many words that tend to appear more frequently than others. So I'd suggest doing as many practice questions from ETS as possible, and feeling free to use a thesaurus to learn the words that you don't know. Remember to spend more time learning and reviewing your mistakes and less time mindlessly practicing problems. Make sure you truly understand exactly why got each question incorrect, and how to avoid making the same mistake again in the future. The key to a great GRE score is not being a superb English student, but instead learning and improving while you practice realistic GRE questions. Finally, I would suggest taking advantage of FREE resources. There are many places where you can get GRE word lists, flashcards, etc. to help improve your vocabulary. Again, this is NOT something you should be paying for. Here's a course I've used before for FREE. Very comprehensive and targeted GRE vocab list. The Ultimate GRE Vocabulary Course • PrepScholar GRE So avoid that dictionary, use free resources to improve your vocabulary, and practice smarter, not harder.
  3. Hey sea of green. Although ETS only has a few official essay questions in test format, it does provide a pool of essay topics. For example, the Issue pool is provided from ETS at this link: Introduction to the GRE Issue Task (For Test Takers) Overall, I'd recommend practicing with questions that are directly from ETS or are adapted specifically to resemble the structure and difficulty level of ETS questions. Way too many GRE questions are floating out there where clearly the goal is to just write really hard questions, get you to struggle and bang your head against the wall, but then claim that pain that you feel is "improvement" lol. So yeah, definitely focus on the ETS questions first, making sure you understand how to do as many of them as possible.
  4. From my 10 years of experience teaching the GRE (now with PrepScholar), I would say the most effective method we've found is to: 1) Break the GRE into “digestible skills” and identify your weakest skills and 2) Focus specifically on your weakest skills. Remember to spend more time learning and reviewing your mistakes and less time mindlessly practicing problems. Treat every practice question seriously and give it your best. Make sure you truly understand exactly why got each question incorrect, and how to avoid making the same mistake again in the future. So the key here is focused, targeted improvement. If you target practice and improve your performance skill by skill, before you know it you’ll be seeing a clear increase in your GRE score and soon enough, you’ll be hitting and exceeding your target GRE score.
  5. I think it's more important to focus on how you're studying, more so than what materials you're using. You should identify what GRE skills give you the most difficulty, then practice on those. It's really easy to fall into a trap of just mindlessly going from question to question, crossing your fingers and just hoping that a lot of study time and effort will instantly transfer into a massive score increase. You'll have better luck if you make an excel spreadsheet where you identify the skills where you're getting questions wrong, and then focus on your weakest skills first. If you target practice and improve your performance skill by skill, before you know it you’ll be seeing a clear increase in your GRE score and soon enough, you’ll be hitting and exceeding your target GRE score.
  6. Hey coolclisto. Yeah, I totally agree with you here. The real GRE would never have that kind of ambiguity in a question. I think the test writers were trying to be clever to fool some students, and they ended up fooling themselves writing that question lol. So I wouldn't beat yourself up over not understanding how to do this question, but it does go to show that practicing well-written GRE questions is a MUST for efficient use of your study time. In my 10 years of experience with the GRE, I'd say the best piece of advice that I could give you is to break up the GRE into “digestible skills” and identify your weakest skills, or areas that are frequently tested on the GRE and you tend to get those questions in those areas wrong. Then you should start improving on the GRE skill by skill, starting with your weakest skills. Many students do this on their own, by making an Excel spreadsheet, or you could use a product like PrepScholar GRE to figure out your weakest skills. I'd definitely recommend only using test prep products that give you a FREE diagnostic exam though. It's not something that you should pay for. Finally, when studying, focus on quality, not quantity. Learn what you need to learn, and do not mindlessly practice for hours on end. Take every single question seriously and review your answers carefully to make sure you learn to never make the same mistake twice.
  7. PowerScore has done something similar. They made an overlaid plot of the distributions for percentage of test takers who answered a quant question correctly and which category that question was in. Here's the plot: [ATTACH=CONFIG]7164[/ATTACH] I think the big takeaways from this graph are that data analysis questions tend to trip people up more than the average quant question, and that there appear to be some fairly easy arithmetic questions in the quant section that most people get correct.
  8. Yeah, I think the key to this question is rewriting Quantity A, because ((k+2)*)* = (1/(k+2))*. That way, you can see that the two quantities are equal.
  9. Hey Masha, Another way to look at this problem: you can factor out a negative 1 to cancel out some of the expressions: x ф y = (x+y)*(x-y) + (y-x)*(y+x) +x*y x ф y = (x+y)*(x-y) + (-(-y+x)*(y+x) +x*y x ф y = (x+y)*(x-y) - (x-y)*(y+x) +x*y So from here, we have (x+y)*(x-y) minus itself, so those cancel out. Then we'll just have: x ф y = x*y So to calculate (sqrt12)ф(sqrt3), we just multiply them together: (sqrt12)*(sqrt3) = sqrt36 And since the square root of 36 is 6 or -6, the answer could be 6 or -6. I think whoever wrote the question probably forgot that the square root of 36 has TWO values; one positive value and one negative value. So I'd recommend practicing with either ETS material or better written quant questions that won't have this mistake, or they meant to say D is the right answer.
  10. Hey greaterthan. This definitely looks like a poorly worded question that wouldn't be on the GRE. The GRE would definitely make sure that it was clear if we had a combination question where the order doesn't matter or a permutation question where the order does matter. Also, this is why to do well on the GRE Quantitative section, you don’t need to be a math genius — but you do need to have access to the best resources for GRE math prep! There are lots of free and paid test prep material out there, and going through it all can definitely be overwhelming. Here's a short writeup that goes over some of the pros and cons of different test prep material. Also, my advice would be to focus a bit more on ETS questions and questions that are more similar to the format that ETS uses. That way you won't have to spend time figuring out if the question writer wanted you to think of combinations or permutations. GRE Math Prep: The 18 Best Study Resources • PrepScholar GRE
  11. Here's a great solution to your question. Just click on the images below. [ATTACH=CONFIG]7160[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]7161[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]7162[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]7163[/ATTACH]
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