preparing for the verbal GRE

moommoombaba
Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:08:52 +0000

you are just like me… all math but no reading. well that’s the reason i picked engineering i figured. I did want to do well on the GRE though so I bought the princeton guide and read all of the verbal section. i got the strategies down and started making flash cards. they have a verbal list of ~600 vocab which is A LOT to me but no so much to others who crammed themselves into a 5000 word list. anyways i started 5 weeks b4 the test and could only finish half the list. took the test and no surprise i got a mere 440… i think 40% percentile. and 4.0W btw so not too good neither. i was in a panic for a moment cuz that’s definitely a below average score. i wanted to study more and take it again but it was already late november and i was running out of time. i found that i wouldn’t be able to raise my score significantly within given time frame so i just went with those low scores. good that i was applying engineering grad school so i guess the verbal scores were not so important and apparently it didn’t hurt me. I got into all the schools that i applied to.

moral of the story, study early and spend ALOT of time on memorizing the word list. you can’t do well on the test without a decent amount of gre vocab even if you know the strategies on how to tackle the test.

seems like you are doing math related program, i would say verbal is not so important, as long as it’s not so bad that would raise a flag. and a good verbal won’t help you so much either, except to compete for fellowship. so if you are like me and hate studying the vocab then just study enough so you can get average verbal score. the engineering schools that i applied to has an average verbal score of around 520 so i would aim for that if i were you. well that’s my targeted score but i just couldn’t get it :/. (Qualitative definitely is important, get 800, anything below ~750 would very likely hurt you)