New GRE Exam Study Plan: Target Score – 1500+
I am looking for some advice on preparation for Verbal section in new GRE. I would really appreciate if you could help me out here.
Target Score: 1500+
Background:
I have been studying for GRE for over 3 months now and my exam date is a week away from today. I have thoroughly revised all the 3500+ words in Barron’s. I have finished books from Kaplan, Barron’s and ETS. I have solved RC from around 15 tests of Big Book.
Current standing:
- Quant: No complaints
- AWA: Ok
- Barron’s tests scores: 325+ in both tests in CD
- Kaplan Book Test: 330 (using table from Barron’s)
- Kaplan Online Test 1: 1310-1460
Predicament:
Having done all of what is mentioned above, I still don’t feel confident about facing Verbal section.
After every test or practice exercise, I do a thorough analysis of my answers and try to come up with statistics of my own pertaining to accuracy and where I am going wrong.
I have come to the conclusion that my accuracy wavers too much especially in RC(20%-100%).
I have tried everything from my end but I am still clueless as to how I can crack this section. The conventional methods to improve comprehension skills is not helping me out much.
I have tried a lot to quantify as to what change can lead to improvement in accuracy but so far I haven’t got any success. “Practice makes a man perfect”, is not working out for me.
Questions:
As you would also gone through preparation for GRE, could you let me know if mine is a normal situation? Do people who get high scores have such a varying accuracy? Any tips as I have got just one week left?
How to prepare for GRE in 1 Week
Vikas, your email clearly shows your practical and above average student.
To sum it up, you want to know how to prepare for GRE in 1 Week.
You have analyzed all possibilities that could lead to your GRE Score improvement.
With 1 week left for your real GRE Exam, now you shouldn’t worry about learning new strategies.
Take Power Prep, revise all the concepts and strategies you have learned so far. Spend time building your confidence and visualizing solving all the problems in time.
I would suggest solving Big Book’s Analytical Section questions. Reading Comprehension questions are not just passages anymore, its more like the Analytical section in old GRE pattern, when GRE was offered for 2400.
Solving few analytical passage will help you improve RC’s scores.
Related : Revised GRE: Old Wine in New Bottle; Scored 1380 -1530
Hi,
I am Nitish and currently working in an IT company. I hardly get any time to prepare for GRE due to loads and loads of work. So I am planning to quit job or either take leave for 2 or 3 months (Which is least likely to be achieved.) . Can anyone please help and suggest what to do. Now it is March and I am planning to give GRE in June Beginning.
I want to score around 1400+
i m a m.tech 2nd year student n planning for PHD from US for which i have to go through GRE n TOEFL..
please anyone suggest me from where i should start my preparation as i have no idea about any of the books and study materials n i m not much good in english also…
hi..could any one provide more power prep test links for practise for my gre preparation?
i wrote the old Gre and i scored 1270. i am not satisfied with this score as i beliv i can do better in the new test. i luv to attend stamford and thats my motivation…also i need some financial aid…furthermore in my country i can’t access good gre materials, especially ets materials….no access to credit cards so i can’t shop online…i really need materials…i also hope to sit for the subject test in physics as i hope to do in applied physics/maths….i need advice and help as to getting aid for phd…cgpa is 78%.or maybe materials to sit for another gre , i’ll welcome a study partner
The RC’s on New GRE are very difficult. I agree that to crack this section one need to solve the Big Book Analytical and logical reasoning section. I immediately realized this when I appeared for New GRE on August 01,2011.
I am in exactly a similar situation right now. I waver too much in the RC part. I have been practicing at least 6-8 passages per day for the last 1.5 months. I now am pretty sure that there is nothing much to do since we have our exams less than a week away. ( I have tried at least four different approaches in RC). So all I can say is don’t whine about what you are unable to do now. Now we should be phlegmatic and try to be best at what we are best in. Let’s try to focus on the areas we do well and make sure in the exam we get those areas right.
For the RC problems, I am keeping up my old habit of doing a few RC passages daily without expecting any further improvement though. I am sure that we will get some of the questions in RC right (which we surely will).
I am speaking this from my personal experience till now. I have appeared for at least 10 different practice tests (excluding powerprep). Will appear the powerprep test tomorrow with 5 days to go to review it before I take my GRE. I waver in a verbal score of 510-690 but mostly between 510-610. My first full practice GRE score in verbal was 220-320. I realize that I have done the best that I can within the time I kept aside for my GRE prep. I believe that a positive attitude will now help us the most (even more that trying to improve our RC skills in the last moment).
The rest will take care of itself.
Happy preparing and all the best for your exams. We’ll rock in the GRE exam don’t worry.
To HSB:
Thank you for maintaining such an awesome blog. I have been a silent reader for nearly a month now. This blog has helped me a lot in my preparation.
I wanted to say much more here but will keep the rest to my post-gre post.
hey can u suggest us from where are u actually practising the rc questions???
Maybe it’s the concentration factor? How do you go about the verbal section? Do you take it from 1 to 20 or tackle the RC part 1st or the others? You could try any one of these & experiment how it works for you… in one of the recent posts, it was said that completing the RC part 1st would be better…something along the lines, ‘..you wouldn’t want to leave the tougher part to the last when you’re fighting with time..’ Try it. Good luck!
@HSB:disqus Thank you so much for your encouraging words. As a matter of fact, to tackle analytical section, I referred the Critical Reasoning questions from Official Guide of GMAT. However, I would certainly spend some time on the analytical passages given in Big Book tests. My slight obsessiveness with RC stems from the fact that performance in RC would make or break my score.
@da838494ab5a72dbe00a921c690236af:disqus All I can say is that a lot of people do not succeed because they give up either too early or just before they are about to hit their target. So, hang in there.
Hey bro, your score is better than mine. I took my test on Power Prep II. Verb was 270 – 370 with studious dint of 4 month. I too have the books you have mentioned, additionally, kaplan verbal workbook. I have hardly worked for 1 week for math but could score 750-800. I think my brain has been trained a little bit differently. I too have one week for my test. I have concentrated myself on practice giving 10 hrs per day. I wish scoring around 500+ in original. now we can only do is to practice hard and grasp all of the tactics so far we have learnt. i wish your wish to be fulfilled. best of luck.
I wanted to know about number of tests offered by PoweprepII. Is there only 1 test offerred?