Attacking GRE General

[Christeen Armani]

Hello Guys Eveywhere!,

I'm planning to prepare for the masters in mathematics in USA and for that reason I need to do the GRE (general). I'm not worried regarding the Math. portion of it since my concentration was Math. during university but I'm rather worried about the English portion of this exam because it's not my first language obviously and I heard that this English portion is tricky and needs lots of vocabularly (and my memory is not that strong to memorize things easily). My main question is:

Can I take advantage of any time I save in solving the quantitative portion of the GRE to go back to the English portion and use that extra time in trying to figure out answers of questions I suscpect to be wrong?

Also do you guys know if universities just take a look at the overall score or the individual scores of the English and Math?

Also one more request please: Is there any free compiled gre Math. & English questions in any document format that I can download and use to test myself thoroughly before the exam?

Thanks in advance

Christeen Armani

[Daria Morgendorffer]

Hi Christeen,

Unfortunately the test doesn't allow you to use extra time to work on another section. The amount of time you have on each section is fixed.

I don't know about math programs in particular, but most grad programs only use GRE scores as a screening tool - i.e., if you're above a certain score, you're fine. Of course they'll understand that, as an international student, your English might not be very strong and they'll take that into account. To help prep for vocab, I used an Android phone app called GRE Tutor. I'm not sure if they have it for other phones or just Android. Of all the apps I tried out, it was by far the most helpful, and it was free.

If you want to take a free practice test, Kaplan offers them online frequently: http://www.kaptest.com/GRE/Explore-the-GRE/gre-practice-test.html

Hope that helps. Good luck!