Poor GRE score for advice

[bzj_michael]

Hey!

My Gre Score-1130 with 350V and 780Q, AWA-3. Acadamic GPA-3.4.

I major in Computer Science. Could u suggest me some universities which provides good financial aid and sounds good in Academics also.

Thanks a lot!

[Eigen]

How much research experience do you have?

Publications?

And how good are your letters or recommendation likely to be?

1200 is the GRE cutoff I see most frequently.

I'm assuming you're an international student?

[lifetimestudent]

Your quant is actually pretty good. Of course an 800 is better than 780 but I'm sure that your potential computer science programs care a lot more about the quantitative score than the verbal one. That said, 350 verbal is pretty low -- any way that you can bring that up, even to 450, will make you a much stronger candidate. I had a lot of success when studying for the GREs with making flash cards while reading. I just read as much as I could and used a dictionary for all the words I didn't know. Over time you can grow your vocabulary, even just learning the top 200-400 GRE words (you can find many lists online) will do wonders for your score.

[TheDude]

Your quant is actually pretty good. Of course an 800 is better than 780 but I'm sure that your potential computer science programs care a lot more about the quantitative score than the verbal one. That said, 350 verbal is pretty low -- any way that you can bring that up, even to 450, will make you a much stronger candidate. I had a lot of success when studying for the GREs with making flash cards while reading. I just read as much as I could and used a dictionary for all the words I didn't know. Over time you can grow your vocabulary, even just learning the top 200-400 GRE words (you can find many lists online) will do wonders for your score.

When I read stuff like this it makes me feel for international students who have to take this thing. It seems most english as a first language people take for granted how easy it is for them to score a 500.

Get the verbal score up like written above...even if it means a lessening of the Quant score to s small degree.

[Eigen]

Actually, most of the international students I know did better on their Quant than a lot of the domestic students I know.

Mostly because it's much more important to have at least a moderate (500) verbal score as an international student than as a domestic student, due to the subsequent worries about a larger language barrier with international students.

That said, memorizing large lists of words that most native English speakers don't know either isn't really harder for international students than domestic ones, especially because the GRE is very particular about which definition they use, and very consistent.