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Revised GRE: Old Wine in New Bottle; Scored 1380 -1530

Revised GRE Experience – Shared by Kishore.

I took the Revised GRE on August 17, 2011 @ Gurgaon center (India)

Link to New GRE Experience collections.

Final Revised Score Breakdown:

  • Verbal: 630-730
  • Quantitative: 750-800
  • AWA: Scores awaited.

About the GRE Center

The exam center is run like a military establishment.. quite intimidating initially. They run a tight ship and take no nonsense from any candidate.

When did I book the test date?

This was in the middle of all the brouhaha about the new GRE being some alien entity, i.e. sometime early this year. More precisely it was somewhere in April 2011. Couldn’t get any dates for July, and the few dates in June were in the middle of my end-semesters.

About My GRE Preparation

Frankly, I do not think my preparation was as exhaustive when compared to many documented here. To train my vocabulary, I used to regularly practice on tyrannosaurusprep.com. They have a neat lil’ online vocab game (with a level indicator and stuff). I guess this is good for repetitive practice.. and frankly seemed a lot better than mugging up a million words straight.

Meanwhile, I used a couple of podcasts, for GRE vocab preparation and a final audiobook-ish thing titled Million Dollar Vocabulary ( I strongly recommend this title to anybody who doesn’t wish to get bored by words).

New GRE Books I used for my prep

  • McGraw-HIll New GRE 2012 .. First book i could get my hands on back in April 2011.
  • Cracking the New GRE 2011 … Borrowed from a friend.. Awesome book for every section (especially RCs). A must have.
  • ETS Official Guide. Ordered the book a month before test day, arrived 2 days later.. unwrapped it the night before. Yup, crazy. But i *think* the AWA notes in there are worthy. But cant really evaluate the book cause i never really used it.

You can buy all the above listed 3 books in India at Flipkart.

New GRE Tips 

  • Test day isn’t a time to experiment.
  • Know your test taking style and your idiosyncrasies well ahead of test day.
  • Take as many practice test as possible.. and see what goes thru your mind when answering each type of question.
  • Know your weaknesses and most of all, your strengths.

With regards to the new verbal pattern, i’d suggest skip the long RCs(4-5 paras) ones initially and come back to them at the end. I decided to finish up with the rest, and had 10 minutes to face a really irritating RC. The text completion ones, sometimes, have very clear hints to the words they’re alluding to. Look for these clues. Personally, I found sentence equivalence hard.

Click to Enlarge

Onto math, the calculator can be quite an asset, if one knows when to use it. Some questions are designed keeping in mind there’s a calculator available. (I faced one of those). The rest of the math section was fairly simple.

Final Word on New GRE

The new GRE is NOT hard. It’s just old wine in new bottle (or something like that.. but you get the point right?).

Good Luck and don’t forget your dreams and ambition. They light up the road ahead.

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31 Comments

  1. Hi HSB,
    Β Β Β  I am going to take GRE by oct mid, I finished around 20 wordlist as far as now. I need your some tips,when to take the mock tests and few tips for the preparation of GRE to get +1250 …

  2. Hi Kishore,
    First of all congratulations for your scores. I read you post 2 days prior to my exam. The experience of other people about the new GRE pattern had actually made me nervous. Reading you post was an assurance that the new GRE wasn’t that tough as it was made out to be. I gave my examΒ on 22nd August.Β Although , I cannot disagree that the Β RCs Β were lengthy and irritating as you said, Β I too had to struggle with them. But I managed to score a range of 1400-1530.Also I thank HSB for bringing all people with common ambition together

  3. congrats on ur scores πŸ™‚

    add some more experience wit more details in it πŸ™‚
    if u feel like adding ur test q’s please add it πŸ™‚

    hey can u shareΒ that audio disc of million dollar vocabulury????

    tanx πŸ™‚

  4. Hi,
    Congrats for your GRE score πŸ™‚ Nice write-up about your experience !

    Can you please recommend few sites for revised GRE mock tests ?

  5. Aren’t you ashamed of publishing such an article. It is completely written by you for affiliate marketing. All are not fools here. I can smell the article much easily…What a great way to boost your affiliate marketing in Flipkart and Amazon with following ID’s “adminhappy1”. It is even alright If you create some new post but then atleast make sure your friend writes it next time.

    1. FYI
      1) Kishore who shared the experience have responded to comments. If you have any doubts on who wrote the post, reply to his comment.
      2) Refer to Blog Disclosure policy (link is available) in the footer of this blog and read the FTC section.
      3) Yes, links to book are affiliate link in this post and as well as in other several posts. It has been clearly disclosed under Disclosure policy.
      4) Every post that are shared by others will have a line saying if that’s a guest post or not. If its written by someone, then you will see something like this “Following experience was shared by Kishore” or “Thanks to Kishore for sharing the experience”
      5) Refer to screeshot of email conversation with Kishore in the post above.

      Do you smell the truth now?

  6. Hey kishore…
    I am abt to give my test on 20th sep…
    I am really worried abt verbal sections…Can u guide me how to prepare for sentence completion and how many words i have to memorize to have a chance?

  7. I have just 2 months for the GRE. Your article has lifted my spirits!
    Tried tyrannosaurusprep.com , it does seem to be more interesting than just learning words and its focussed on GRE words too. But, I think it has one type of questions. Theres also vocabulary.com which has many different kind of questions but the words are not restricted to GRE.
    You faced problems with sentence equivalence right? I think it has to do with learning synonyms. Did you study synonyms and antonyms thoroughly? If so pls let us know!
    Best of luck with universities!

  8. Hey guys all the test takers are telling RC are tough because they don t know some RC questions are critical reasoning (C.R) questions that appear in GMAT.ETS does not categorize CR as separate question , they say it is intergal part of reading comprehension. So none of the prep books have these type of question and strategies to solve them, if you want learn to solve them correctly then you have to solve GMAT CR questions. Even the HSB did not mention about CR in the revised GRE articles.

    1. Suraj – I have mentioned it 2 twice in the blog so far. Also, those who have singed up for free GRE course knows about that.

      1. Oho then i haven’t read that article or post. Can you please tell me in which post/article you have mentioned if you don’t mind. Because i am regular visitor of this blog (May be i have missed one).

  9. hye kishor!

    well done my friend. you got a great score i have registered for the test on jul.29th and got my test date on 29th sept. i have no idea how to prepare for verbal section(mainly sentence completion). can you tell me how much words i have memorize for a targeted score of 530-630 in verbal section.
    please i m waiting for your reply can u give me some good suggestions about verbal section plzzzzzzzzzzzz…………

  10. Hey….
    ConGo….. :):)
    Finally sum1 found “D Macabre New Revised GRE” nt hard to cRack.. πŸ˜‰
    Can u please temme d procedure of sending ur score to the four universities after the exam…. ??!!!
    NjOi… nd Gudluck 4 future… πŸ™‚

    1. “Can u please temme d procedure of sending ur score to the four universities after the exam…. ??!!!”

      If you mean the part right after finishing the exam, then.. you get a prompt whether you wish to report your score to a university.. Accept it.. and next, you need to search for your desired univ country-wise and then state-wise. There’s the alternate of querying by institution code too (i guess this ones more accurate). Select the exact grad school you’re looking for at the Univ (A Univ can have multiple grad schools, each for law, management studies, medicine and so on). Check with your univ website whether you need to report to the univ only, or further onto the specific department (Some mite). Select four univs/depts this way.

  11. Hi HSB, I applied for a PhD programme in an Australian University where the required iBT TOEFL score is 92, but i scored 64 in my recent test. Please, should i send them this score or not? Thanks

  12. Nice write-up and congrats on your GRE score. I hope you get the university of your choice.
    Can you recommend some site/prep service for revised GRE mock tests ?

    1. i tried majortests.com for a while.. I believe they’re good. The RC mocks and sentence equivalence were helpful.

  13. πŸ™‚ well that’s new, mostly the test takers that have taken the new test have regarded the RC as very tough , in fact the whole test. Thanks for the mood upliftment ..
    I’m confused about one thing, aren’t the McGraw hill and ETS Guide the same book?

  14. hey Kishor,

    Congratulations!! awesome score.Did u take any practice tests.If yes, which ones? Were ur practice test scores close to your actual score?

    Thanks,
    VB

    1. I tried the online mock test at mhpracticeplus.com, which accompanies the mcgrawhill book.. i just took the verbal sections of the two test.. and i remember the my estimates on the scores were around 159 and 165 on the 170 scale.. so i dont really know how that translates onto the old 800 scale.

      And ofcourse, there’s powerprep.. i took the the untimed one first just to get used to the questions.. scored around 318/340.. and then a day before test day.. i decided to try the timed test.. Unfortunately, this was when i discovered that the timed one has the same question set as the untimed one.. So got pissed there.. but eventually took the whole test (minus AWA) in under 40 mins and scored (750-800 each) Utterly pointless once you know the questions.

  15. Thank you for the pep tonic Kishore. I am taking it on 25th and was beginning to be rather nervous about it. Hope it goes off well.
    And good luck with your future plans! πŸ™‚

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