phckmaroon5

Not active on this blog but found this thread helpful during my GRE studying. Manhattan Prep was my main study tool. I bought the 12 books or whatever plus the 5lb practice book and all the vocab cards. I feel like Manhattan is regarded as one of the best in terms of studying materials but a couple of things to keep in mind if you're using them: 1) Their verbal practice tests contain far more difficult vocab words than you see on the actual test while the sentence structure in completion problems are usually overly simple. GRE sentence completion is more about knowing what the sentence is trying to convey than a vocab test. 2) In a similar way, the most difficult reading comprehension questions in Manhattan, while generally quite good, can focus too much on remembering very specific or convoluted details of a passage, whereas difficult actual GRE questions will focus more on reasoning and inference. 3) Math questions, while generally very good, can also suffer from the same issue. Data interpretation questions in Manhattan questions are hands down ridiculous sometimes. For example, there is a question that asks you to estimate a percent based on a quantity graph and both 33% and 35% are given as potential answers. What you end up doing is guessing between the two because your margin of error in estimation is (unsurprisingly) greater than 2%. 4) One of the greatest strengths of Manhattan math for me was learning to fully read and understand a question before answering. I would often enter a wrong answer because the question was deceptively convoluted or because I skipped over a "not", "least", or "even". Manhattan punishes you severely for these types of mistakes. Manhattan: 164q 163v average over 5 tests Powerprep 1: 170q 169v Powerprep 2: 170q 166v Actual test: 168q 167v

Hi, For the past week or so, I've been struggling through the manhattan quant gre computerized practice test (scoring around 161-163, aiming for 167+). Mostly my issues have been with time (seem to always run out with 1 left) and stupid mistakes-- although some questions are really tricky! I was a little discouraged because I was previously scoring 166+ on the ETS paper practice tests. Anyways, I wanted to hit the books to bump my score, so I went ahead and bound the 5lb practice problem book. The weird thing is that today I took the quant diagnostic included in the book and breezed through it, getting all the questions right with about 10 minutes of extra time. I was able to go back through the questions and felt certain about all my answers in contrast to rushing till the end of the computerized tests. What gives?? I'm not sure where I'm at now in my actual scoring/ why there's such a large discrepancy between my scores. What tests should I trust to predict performance on actual test day?