jrmcgee

I took a bunch of practice exams and never got a perfect score on them. I usually got one or two reading comp questions wrong, and maybe a couple incorrect "fill in" questions. I brushed up on my vocab with the Manhattan Prep flash cards, which I found really helpful. Really, really good stuff. I think just filling in the gaps made it easier to eliminate answers in questions, as I was always pretty good at it, but now encounter fewer words I don't know. I also think I got somewhat lucky on the reading comp questions, which I thought were all easy and unambiguous, unlike during practice exams I took. But that might have been actually using my extra time to re-read the passages, as I usually have 6-8 minutes left at the end (which I would just skip to the next section on the practice exams rather than really using every minute). I'm not a huge bookworm, but I do read constantly online and I read things like NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc. I think that helped me in the verbal section.

I just took the GRE and I got a 170 on verbal and 164 on quant. Is that quant score good enough for a top 5 MS computer science program? I feel like they expect close to a perfect quant score, but I think my score works out to roughly 89th percentile. I was surprised and overjoyed to have gotten a 170 verbal score, but isn't it true a MS CS admissions committee would care more about the quant section? Does the 170 buy me anything?