About three weeks ago, I posted a thread (that promptly sank like a stone) about how I took the GRE and canceled my scores due to extreme nervousness and inability to focus during the quantitative portion. I was afraid the same thing would occur when I retook it, even though I studied a lot and felt much better prepared. I felt it bubbling up but I managed to push it back down.
The result was a 660 on the quantitative, decent but not spectacular. I got a 740 on the verbal though. I’m happy with my scores, although I think there’s some room for improvement on the math. I stupidly ran out of time at the end because I thought I had enough time to finish, so I slowed down. I was on question 26 when I realized that the test was over! I didn’t even get to guess on the last two, but luckily I had something marked for #26 already. Oh well, I doubt it affected my score by more than 10 points.
I know a lot of people are probably going to take the GRE around this time. I’m pretty much just posting to show that one bad performance isn’t the end of the world. Good luck everyone!
Advice for anyone reading who plans to take the GRE:
Do at least one practice test at least a month or so your scheduled test date, so you can see how much preparation you need. You can download PowerPrep software from the ETS website which has two sample tests and a bunch of practice questions.
Practice, practice, practice. I wish I had a good test prep book recommendation. I used the Princeton Review and the Barron’s GRE guide. The Princeton Review book is good for the verbal but not the math. If you need more than a brief refresher on math, don’t use this book only. It explains each topic too briefly and doesn’t give a lot of examples. In contrast, the Barron’s guide is full of information, almost overwhelmingly so. It goes over everything that might possibly appear and all the topics are divided into sections with examples, key facts, and about 15-20 practice questions at the end. This is a good book to get because it’s cheap and thorough, but I thought their practice tests did not reflect the math material very well. They were a lot harder. Also their graphs were impossible to interpret and way too complicated. By that I mean I never got the same values from reading the graph that the writers did. The graphs that appeared on my GRE anyway, were a lot clearer.
I wish I had some more helpful advice on the verbal but I didn’t really study for that part. I knew that trying to cram lists of vocabulary words in my head wouldn’t work for me, and that seems to be what most practice books expect you to do. I’d advice at least looking over the word lists that pop up on the GRE because I did see a few of those on the test. The only one I remembered was “mendacious” which means truthful. However, the similar-looking word “mendicant” means “beggar” not “liar”.
Also for the analogy part, thinking of a relationship between the two words on screen and seeing if that’s the same for any of the answer choices worked well for me. For example for catholic: universal, the relationship is that they are synonyms, so look for synonyms in the word list. (Yeah, who needs to know that catholic also means universal? Does anyone actually use it that way?) Be familiar with secondary word meanings.
Sorry, Arien. But they are still very good scores.
What counts is your total score, not your individual scores. If you took the GREs between May 1994 and September 2001 (like I did), you have to get a total score of 1875 to be eligible, but it doesn’t seem to matter how those points are distributed between verbal, math, and analytic scores.
Side note: Why, when discussing SAT scores, do people always give their combined score, but give the individual scores when discussing GRE scores? (At least that’s how such discussions always went when I took those tests)
Acording to that Mensa link, the reason they state about why they no longer use GRE, SAT, etc scores is because they no longer correlate with IQ tests. That seems strange. I know they’ve readjusted the SAT because a broader range of people now apply to college, but shouldn’t that just increase the likelihood that the SAT reflects the population?
Ok, I just looked up Mensa on Wikipedia, and another reason they give is that those tests may not measure up to the 98th percentile. I know that the math GRE can only measure up to the 92 or so percentile. Does anyone know if the same is true for the SAT math section?
On preview: ok, so some people use catholic in that other way. Being raised Catholic, I didn’t realize that the catholic part of the Apostles’ Creed did not refer to the Roman Catholic church. It occurs to me that I don’t know much about other Christian denominations.
I was raised Protestant, and it always struck me as a bit weaselly how non-Catholic churches say the “catholic” in the Apostles’ Creed doesn’t mean the Roman Catholic Church :dubious: But it was drummed into our heads in confirmation class (when we had to memorize the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed) that “catholic” didn’t mean “Roman Catholic”.
Heavens! I took the GRE in 2006. No matter, since I am not even close to that 1875, given my math score. I don’t know why we give individual scores for one test and not for another. Perhaps because those scores can be wildly and widely discrepent? Basically, I have almost always scored near or off the charts for verbal/language etc, and near or at the bottom for math*. The makes me stupid to most of my more “math” oriented “friends”. So be it.
*the first practice test I did for the GRE in math, I did cold-just to see where I stood. I did not score enough points to be tabulated on the score table. I can laugh about this now, but at the time-twas painful. I did improve, a lot, but nowhere near my verbal score…
Preliminary National Merit status is determined by both scores, so they’re usually reported as a single NM score. SAT total are often used as a criterion for college admissions, and for National Merit, so they’re often reported as a total. GRE is sometimes reported as a total and sometimes as separate scores, because some grad programs look at all subtest scores, while others want the combined verbal/quantitative total and others used to look at the analytic section.
it’s true for the ACT as well, and we dont’ break that one down. I have arrived at at time in my life when I can no longer remember any of my scores for my college entrance exams. This is a good thing.
Put it down to an odd custom and move on-that’s my advice. (about the referring to them differently, that is).
Colleges care about the whole SAT score. English grad school doesn’t really care if you can do 9th-grade math. Chem grad school doesn’t really care if you know what “vicissitudinous” means.
