GRE Math Experiences

[university99]

Hi all. I am taking my GRE in a week and was wondering what people experienced with the test. Did you guys run into any questions on the math section that were complete WTF moments? Is the difficulty of the questions comparable to those found in ETS 10th edition or Kaplan or Peterson's (I'm using these 3 to study)?

Also, did anyone have a majority of questions on the verbal of 1 type? I'm dreading antonyms and analogies and am praying for lots of sentence completions.

[balderdash]

Actually, the only WTF moment I had was because I forgot what was actually a really simple rule: if one triangle has sides x, y, and z, x has to be somewhere between z-y and z+y (obviously that's not mathspeak but that's the basic idea). For some reason this was completely foreign to me.

[assad62]

In the last 5 mins of the quantitative section i had 5 questions left and in those 5 mins I could only do one. I was positive i would get <500 but thankfully I ended up with a respectable 690 in qtv. That was my wtf moment

[DrFaustus666]

Also, did anyone have a majority of questions on the verbal of 1 type? I'm dreading antonyms and analogies and am praying for lots of sentence completions.

Hi ! I've been a student of the GRE for some time now, and your question piqued my interest.

I went to Powerprep and took Test 1, verbal section only, twice.

First time through:

Sentence Completion: 6 questions

Reading Comprehension: 8 questions

Analogies: 8 questions

Antonyms: 8 questions

Second time through:

Sentence Completeion: 7 questions

Analogies: 8 questions

Antonyms: 8 questions

Reading Comprehension: 7 questions

I also conducted an experiment to try to determine the weight of the questions. As both administrations of the test had more Analogies and Antonyms than Sentence Completion and Reading Comprehension, it's not surprising that the Analogies and Antonyms were weighted more heavily.

On my first taking of the test, I deliberately answered all analogy and antonym questions incorrectly, and all others correctly (to the best of my ability). My result was a score of 330.

On the second taking, I did the opposite. I answered the Analogies and Antonyms correctly, while incorrectly answering all sentence completion and reading comprehension questions. My result was 420.

So .... if Powerprep is any measure of the real GRE's Verbal section, it behooves everyone to study the vocabulary as intensely as possible, just as all the books and test guides say.

Good luck,

John

[TheDude]

I'd second that. I have my quant score in the low 700's to high 600's and I think it will be in the 700's for the test, but my verbal score won't move from low 500's to high 500's. I thought I'd be able to brush up on math all summer and just pull a 600 in the verbal section without thinking about it.....Wow I was wrong!

Now trying to just master the barron's high frequency word list should be enough until the end of September.

[DrFaustus666]

I'd second that. I have my quant score in the low 700's to high 600's and I think it will be in the 700's for the test, but my verbal score won't move from low 500's to high 500's. I thought I'd be able to brush up on math all summer and just pull a 600 in the verbal section without thinking about it.....Wow I was wrong!

Now trying to just master the barron's high frequency word list should be enough until the end of September.

Good luck.

As a benchmark ... undergraduate first and second year foreign language classes pace learning at about 60 to 75 new words per week ..., i.e., 10 new words per day. I believe that is about the maximum most people can learn without overload, unless they're in a full-immersion program.

So, you should have just enough time to learn all those high frequency words by the end of September, I would think.

[kaz]

I also didn't have quite enough time for the maths bit. Basically, I made a quick intelligent guess at the 2nd last question and purely guessed the last question. It was a matter of being too cautious, I was pretty sure any mistakes would be due to carelessness, so I double checked quite a bit.