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hi sachin4u, screw the verbal score if you're a math/science/engineering student. there're hundreds of more important factors during admission to a school. it won't make you rejected unless another guy/gal (must be the same gender of yours) applied the same position with the exact same materials (same gpa, same educational background, same toefl score, same area of interest, same everything) except that s/he got q800 v600 in general gre. probability of this situation is, umm what 10^-9 maybe. besides if you retake the gre, this time the probability for getting a v550, q700 is more than the former case's probability and i posit v380 + q800 >> v550 + q700. however money, time and final decision is yours:D btw, i'm talking about the quantitative departments of universities.

regarding my recent ggre experience, ets likes to ask absolute value problems tricked with exponentials and inequalities. so keep an eye on it;)

guys, i couldn't follow the discussion going on here, but here is how i see the question; sd is the mean distance of the samples from the average of the set. so adding two more samples equal to the average makes no contribution to the sum of all distances from the mean. in the first case we have an sd=S and in the second case we have an sd=5S/7. so their difference is 2S/7 which depends on the sd value of the first case. i think the question would be more sound if they ask about the ratio of the initial and final sd (which would be 5/7) take care,

remainder of 1 means the integer is 3k+1 (k is an integer) so you just need to solve; 0 -1 -0.33 possible k values are 0,1,2,3,...,16 and there are 17 of them, so there are 17 integers of this kind.

thanks for all your support & congratulations mates:) @arjmen: thanks for the advice, however i don't suppose i will retake the general test. i really don't care about it or about those schools who are concerned with verbal section of an engineering student from a foreign country. i wrote it solely because it is mandatory (except in some departments of MIT:D). honestly i have some time to prepare and retake the test but i don't want to spend time with memorizing words especially while there is a probability that it may cost me even one question in my subject test. anyhow, i will be done with ets after like three months, but may give general test again if one of my target schools will offer a conditional admission:sleepy: @dimas: well, the difficulty of the q problems are something in between pp and tm, but closer to pp. i think people generally posts more tricky & somewhat difficult problems here. and for the distribution of the subjects; i didn't get any permutation/combination questions, probability questions were like a joke, i got 2 standard deviation questions, some inequalities & absolute values, equations with 2-3 unknowns, exponential questions, some mixture problems, velocity problems, geometry problems and conventional graphical analyze questions. well i'm not sure of their reoccurrence times but more or less this is the distribution of the questions i got. however questions get trickier as you continue correctly answering them. so practicing and more importantly analytical thinking becomes crucial. sometimes you get the answer in 2 seconds but who knows it may probably take 5 minutes to do all the calculations if you don't know the trick. However all of the questions are in an elementary level, so there is a limit how much tricky they can become:p besides, don't worry dimas, you will easily ace the quantitative section as far as your replies in tm are concerned.

nice verbal score:blush: i was destined for something around 500. my pp scores were v410; q800 and v400; q800 the reason for this severe verbal score is because of timing. i was on like 15th question when i realize that 10 minutes left, and there would be two more passage questions. anyway i got excited with the time left and carelessly start to guess the answers (well in some of the questions i really needed to guess, but guesssing in a hasty way is deadly). so in the end i end up with this score. my survey section was the best part of my test, i think it's because of the relaxation at the end. i wrote an argument essay for the survey and i believe it was better than my scoring essay:) nonetheless i am hoping a 5+6 or 6+6 from the awa section. and the final part of my post is devoted to the stupidity of general gre test itself:mad: it's totally not fair to make a very tough verbal section and a very easy quantitative section. i mean they should be in equal hardness. Besides they give 30 minutes for 30 bloody verbal questions and 45 minutes for 28 math questions of 4th grade. not everybody has the option to spend their time with memorizing thousands of irrelevant words. i had wished to write the issue topic which is something like "should natural science be taught also to social science students?" Unfortunately it didn't come up in my issue section. God knows how wrathful i would write on that topic:D because the general gre exam is the last ring of my experience on this stupidity:yuck: anyhow, i don't care about the gre and won't be sad not to be admitted to a school because of the verbal score. in fact i will be glad not to be admitted to such a school that cares general gre scores:p oh btw, it is not a sign that i don't know english, my upper toefl score is 283. see how inconsistent ets can be. hope they will come up with something more like a "general" and fair exam next year. will the verbal section not change, they should ask something like 30 advanced calculus questions in 30 minutes and show us that there is no injustice in general gre. take care,

hi, i had my toefl last week and since then my address has changed:doh: anybody has an experience how to change one's registered address before ets posts the scores:hmm:

as far as i know, you should call ets for additional score reporting orders. check www.toefl.org for details and the phone number for your region. btw you have a credit card right? unfortunately they fee additional score reports :(

have faith lobster, you will make it:grad:

are you comfortable with your essay? 4+ in your essay will secure 213

hi saraj, since i didn't do an intensive preparation, i was aimed for a final score around 270, however more points are always welcome and i was a bit disappointed with my reading section, it's the only reason i won't get a 290+ fortunately the highest minimum accepted toefl score for the schools i am interested in is 260 and i will probably get a 270+, so my score don't bothers me much, but as i said earlier, why wouldn't i want more :p

you've got the same score with me, and yes i had also took the test today:p congratz mate:tup: and completely agreed with you on the reading section; before i saw my score, i was pretty sure that reading section would have the highest score, possibly an ace, but it turned out to be the lowest:mad:

sorry buddy, you've misunderstood me, i meant i constantly read message boards of my likings, namely some movie sites, private communities of computer geeks and some scientific interests. there is no particular website for idioms that i had used. However, i remember there was a post about american idioms on the toefl section of testmagic, just make a search and you will get it;) btw, i need to add a comment that before taking the test you should really study on time management. this is as crucial as practicing pp. for instance today i finished the whole test in about 1 hour 45 minutes:eek:, but guess what, i barely complete the essay and the structure sections. this means i was pretty fast on reading and listening parts. i wish i had took my time and had aced the reading section as well:blush:. anyway thanks to some idiots who ruined my whole monday so i ended up with no preparation on time management:mad: and another thing that i had forgot to mention; until last year i was an uber movie addict, so that also helped to develop my english:p take care,

not sure about the exact numbers, but i remember they're like; listening.........30 structure........12 - 29 reading...........26 my essay was ok; matter of fact i always got the lowest essay scores in high school:D but this time i think i will get %10 a 4, %50 a 5, %30 a 5.5 or %20 a 6. hope my example in the essay will not bother the reader:p It was a "do you agree or disagree" topic and i planned to use three examples, but i noticed that i was running out of time when i started to write the third example. It was a tough choice, i either wouldn't mention about the third example at all or give a weak third example compared with the previous ones, and probably a weak conclusion. Finally i decided to stick with only two examples and concentrate on my conclusion. Besides i was able to proofread 3/4 or my essay and i corrected some silly typing errors. i can't save my essay though, but the instructor said it won't be a problem. as far as i know tm, people will start to ask preperation advices as soon as i post this thread:p well to be honest, i didn't have time to prepare for toefl. i just spare my last weekend and yesterday for preparing. during this three day i completed 3 tests in powerprep (done first one twice), go through structure topics in heinemann cd, solved structure practices in barrons cd and in longman cd. solve two complete tests from heinemann cd. for the reading and listening parts i didn't do any special preperation. One thing that is beneficial for me though is that my apartment is quite noisy and my headphones are quite crappy, so as opposed to most of the people i found the quality of voice very good in the test center:D i do generally read on the internet, not literature or education related though. some forums or message boards, so i somewhat quite experienced about the daily english language, specifically about idioms. so that was also a plus for me in listening part. and for the writing part, i read all of the topics yesterday, in case of a possible misunderstanding during the test and only write three essays during three powerprep tests (my first attempt was a nightmare though, i couldn't finish it in time) as for my mistakes i think i made a single mistake in structure because i was asked two similar questions and i answered them differently. for the reading part, i think my mistakes are heavily because of the word meaning questions. i was surprised with some of the words asked and tried to get their meanings from the sentences. but as one can go back and forth during reading questions, i was always thinking about the previous word questions in the background while i was answering other later questions and i think i somewhat lost my concentration on reading part:( anyway it is quite a good score for a preparation of this kind, let's see if i can repeat this efficieny in my general gre test ten days later:p thanks for the various writing tips throughout the forum and special thanks to erin for running such a great board

congrats ish, nice score again:grad::tup: