silfeid

This is preposterous advice for anyone applying to anything in the humanities. It's just bad advice. For any field in which you will be doing work that does not involve intensive math skills (most of the humanities), the quantitative section of the GRE is just a sort of "retard check" - they want to make sure that you have the basic cognitive and study skills needed not to bomb the math section - as long as you perform decently on it, (500+ I would say) then it's simply glossed over. A good score surely won't hurt you, but is not that important. Whereas a good verbal score DOES NOT INDICATE THAT YOU MEMORIZED VOCAB LISTS! That is ridiculous. No one who is trying to prepare for the GRE by memorizing lists of words in the last months before the test is going to boost their score by this method by more than 50 pts. And while luck plays some role, making the verbal portion of the test out to be a crap shoot is not only illogical (and would defeat the point of any standardized test, period), it also is insulting to everyone who did well on the verbal. You want to do well on the verbal? Start reading books at as young an age as possible, and keep reading them your life until you take the test! Read the canon (Especially Dickens)! That Is EXACTLY what the verbal section is testing you on - how many works of canonical literature you have read in your life, because if you have been an avid reader your whole life, you will do well on the test. If not, then...maybe (probably) not. This is why the verbal section matters - because it shows the faculty that you must be able to write, since you damned obviously know how to read (you know what I mean).