Practice GRE scores vs. real GRE scores

[PolPhil]

I'm posting to provide a beacon of hope and a boon to the confidence of anyone, like myself, hoping to get into top 10 grad schools but is not getting much better than above-average scores on practice tests. As you can see, my average scores for practice tests + the first time I wrote the GRE are 159 for Quant and 164 for Verbal, never scoring higher than 164 for Quant and 167 for Verbal. I had resigned myself to good, but not great results, but in the end my actual GRE scores were 164 for Quant and 169 for Verbal, which I'm very pleased with. Stay confident, prepare thoroughly, sleep well and good luck!

[reshan12]

This forum really helped me through my study so hopefully I can help others as well. Sorry for writing so much but there are some things that I found out so late in the piece which I wish someone had told me so I’ll share them in hope that people don’t do the mistakes that I did

 

My practice tests, in chronological order, are as follows:

ETS Official Guide Paper 1 - 313

Magoosh Practice Test - 154V, 155Q - 309

Princeton Review Free - 158V, 159Q - 317

Manhattan Free - 157V, 156Q - 313

Manhattan 2 - 158V, 160Q - 318

Manhattan 3 - 160V, 159Q - 319

Manhattan 4 - 158V, 158Q - 316

PowerPrep I - 156V, 162Q - 318

Manhattan 5 - 159V, 157Q - 316

Manhattan 6 - 160V, 160Q - 320

PowerPrep II (3 days before test) - 154V, 155Q - 309 

 

Unofficial Scores: 160V, 161Q - 321

AWA: to come

 

As you can see my scores jumped back and forth and I ended up getting my best score on the day of the test. I would put this down to over studying and not letting my brain rest as to why my scores did not steadily increase throughout the 10 weeks. My PowerPrep II scores almost made me cry but it shows what no rest and over-studying without breaks in the weeks leading up to the practice can do.

 

I used Magoosh and Manhattan and the Official Guide to study as well as the free online PDF versions of the Official ETS Verbal Reasoning Practice Questions and Quantitative Reasoning Practice Questions.

 

Studied for 10 weeks with a break of about 2 weeks in the middle for Christmas and New Year

I studied around 3 hours a day after work during the week and then 6-8 hours a day on the weekends.

 

Advice that I learnt as I studied:

- Focus on making a plan catered to your needs from the beginning. I used the Magoosh 90 Day Plan for the first 4 weeks before I realised that the plan was not for me as it was actually giving me anxiety about how much I didn’t know rather than helping focus on getting better.

 

- I put off learning vocabulary until about 3 weeks before the exam which I would vehemently not recommend. I recommend to learn the Magoosh Vocab Flashcards and Barrons 1100 back to front from the start. Aim for 50-100 words a day and regular revision sessions (at least twice a week) because that was super stressful towards the end. Learning this early will make you nail most SE questions and some TC questions as well (in my experience) and make your practice test scores higher which will improve your confidence which is key.

 

- Make sure you dedicate time to reviewing what you got incorrect and WHY you got it incorrect and keep revisiting the thought processes of why you are getting certain questions wrong and why your logic is incorrect. I only started doing this around 1 and a half weeks out from the test and it greatly helped me on the test. So doing it from the start will help exponentially.

 

- Set aside 4-5 notebooks that are labelled and dated chronologically and that each serve a specific purpose (e.g. one book for important concepts, one book for important practice questions etc) so when you’re revising you’re not constantly flicking through the different books to find things like I was.

 

- For the verbal component, I cannot stress enough how important it is to focus on the ETS content. In particular, how they write their questions and what they are looking to test in each question. I found this out 2 days before my test that there is a pattern to how they ask many of the verbal questions and once you realise this, you can mitigate the number of times you fall for their traps

 

- For quant, in my actual test, it was heavily based on integer properties, algebra, geometry, and word problems and also of course, data interpretation, so make sure these are practiced to be completed quickly and practice that you’re able to test whether something is correct quickly and efficiently such as practicing “what if x was negative, what if x was a fraction, what is x is zero etc”

 

- Make sure you practice keeping to a time limit from the beginning

 

- Try and find others to study with or join a facebook group.  I studied by myself and I joined a facebook group towards the end of my study and it was much more comforting and it helped me greatly to use others wisdom and ask questions about answers that may be explained superficially (such as the Manhattan answers) 

 

- Sometimes less is more. Try and take breaks in your study. E.g. have one day off a week. I didn’t do this and my brain became overwhelmed and super tired and stressed by the end of 10 weeks. Taking regular breaks can help your brain retain newly learned topics and assign them to long term memory. Also, I feel like I studied so much so many days in a row that I started confusing myself and it was actually a detriment to my results. It may seem like you're wasting time by resting or taking a day off but I promise you that it will be worth it. 

 

- If you’re using Magoosh, make sure you leave 200 questions for verbal and 200 questions for quant unanswered for the last two weeks so you can practice questions that you have not seen before. I blitzed through most of Magoosh questions early on in the piece and then I started redoing questions which  gave me a false sense of confidence which translated to a plateau and eventual decline in practice test scores

 

- Make sure when you go attempt the PowerPreps you are completely rested and attempt the test as if it were the real thing otherwise you will end up with results like mine which really throw your confidence

 

- Not everyone needs to have a rested and chilled couple of days for the days leading up to the test. Many people recommend it but I think the way I scrutinised over the ETS Verbal Reasoning Practice Questions and Quant Reasoning Practice Questions two days before my test was what saved my score from not being terrible.

 

Test Day: sleep well the night before, stay calm, be confident in your abilities, find ways to keep yourself engaged in the test throughout

 

Rating of the practice materials I used:

 

Magoosh

Practice tests - too pedantic and difficult and as many others have said, they are difficult in the wrong ways as they test logic and reasoning that is not usually employed by ETS

Questions - a great tool given how many there are as well as the video explanations. Well worth the money in my opinion for this alone.

Videos - focussed on way too much unnecessary content which unless you are naturally gifted in maths can be overwhelming

 

Manhattan

Practice tests - I would only use these to build your test stamina and for the quant questions (even though they put too many difficult and long ones per section). The verbal is an absolute joke. Please take these test scores with a grain of salt and be sure not to be swayed by their incessant vocab testing because the test will maybe have 1-3 questions per section that are purely vocab based.

 

ETS Verbal Reasoning Practice Questions

This was arguably the best thing I used and I only found it online two days before my test, google: "ETS Verbal Reasoning PDF". I would highly recommend poring over this and really going into each questions, especially the ones labelled 'hard', in depth. As in, do a question and then meticulously deconstruct it to see and understand the logic that is being tested. It is a fundamental process to doing well and if I found it earlier I think my verbal scores would have been at least a few points higher.

 

ETS Quant Reasoning Practice Questions

A bit easier than you will find on the GRE in my opinion but it gives a good gauge as to what to expect. Make sure you complete the practice sets timed

 

PowerPrep I

I found it to be quite a fair bit easier than the actual

 

PowerPrep II

I found to be on par with the actual and therefore, a great assessor of where your weaknesses lie

 

 

 

[reshan12]

On 2/20/2019 at 5:56 PM, reshan12 said:

Unofficial Scores: 160V, 161Q - 321

AWA: to come

 

Update: 

Official Scores: 161V, 160Q, AWA: 5.5 

I must have been so nervous in the test centre that I read the unofficial results the wrong way around or it was scaled up and down (which is less likely). 

Edited March 4, 2019 by reshan12
Adding Quote

[sarpedon2002]

I just wanted to post because I found this thread really helpful when preparing for the GRE, which I took today.

I focussed on Math, because I hadn't covered any of that stuff in well over ten years. And it was hard. Thank god for Magoosh. Those video Math lessons were well worth the money. 

Powerprep One: V 170 Q 167

Powerprep Two: V 169 Q 166

Magoosh: V 161-166 Q 158 -163 (But this was also while I was learning so I'm not sure it's an accurate gauge.

Manhattan: (I only really did the math)

1: 160

2: 161

3: 161

4: 155 (Don't do practice exams at midnight)

5: 160

6 Q: 163

Today's GRE (2/9/2019) V 169 Q 165 Still waiting on analytical writing.

I generally found Manhattan and Magoosh harder than the ETS materials. 

My question was whether other people had the same experience as me that the GRE, especially the Quant, didn't quite play out as other people had described. I had 2 quant parts. The first quant part I felt was really challenging, but it obviously wasn't an experimental, but it felt much harder than medium. I was convinced that I would have to repeat, particularly when the second quant part came out as being easy. I haven't got the break down of the scores and would be keen to know. Obviously, I think under stress our perception of our performance is also different. But it wasn't what I was expecting ...

[VirtualCell]

I also really liked Magoosh. 

 

I only took two practice tests:

 

Magoosh: 158Q, 164V

Princeton: 161Q, 164V, AW: 5 and 5.5

Actual: 169Q, 165V, AW: 5

 

I guess I got lucky? Or didn’t take the practice exams as seriously as the actual test?

Either way—just studied with Magoosh. 100% recommend. 

Edited September 7, 2019 by VirtualCell

[GREYM]

15/05/2021   Q157,V157 ETS PowerPrep 1/2 22/05/2021   Q157,V159 MP 29/05/2021   Q158,V158 MP 05/06/2021   Q159,V161 MP 12/06/2021   Q158,V159 MP 19/06/2021   Q158,V160 MP 26/06/2021   Q158,V162 MP 03/07/2021   Q161,V163 ETS PowerPrep Plus 1 10/07/2021   Q160,V159 ETS PowerPrep Plus 2 17/07/2021   Q164,V158 ETS PowerPrep Plus 3 24/07/2021   Q169,V167 ETS Redo of PowerPrep 1 27/07/2021   Q161,V159 Princeton Review Free Test 1 30/07/2021   Q161,V164 MP Redo of the first test 02/08/2021   Q168,V158 Kaplan 1 05/08/2021   Q162,V160 Kaplan 2 06/08/2021    Q166,V164 ETS Paper 1 07/08/2021    Q167,V161 ETS Paper 2 09/08/2021    Q167,V166 Real Test Total hours of study - around 150 hours I would re-emphasise the importance of ETS tests. Although all of my ETS PowerPrep scores were well below my real scores the types of questions, especially verbal are spot on. Real test verbal section was much easier than any practice test, especially text completions and sentence equivalence. Quant is more difficult than the practice ETS tests plus bear in mind the experimental section. Manhattan Prep is not bad. The quant is much more difficult than the real GRE though. Kaplan is all over the place. Verbal is absolutely useless as the answers to the questions are mostly ambiguous. Also the quant level for the second test was much more difficult than for the first test. I didn’t even bother with third and fourth. For the $150 that I have paid, I don’t think that it was worth it. In general regarding verbal I would say that all tests apart from the ETS are really suboptimal. They focused on extremely obscure vocabulary which never came up on the real test, words like “protozoan” or “peregrinate”. I used LSAT and a bit of GMAT material for read comp. I have learned about 1,200 words for the test but I think I could do away with 700. Also if you have time just read a lot and mark all of the unknown words, this is much better as it gives you a contextual and conceptual meaning instead of literal and instructive ones. I also used free McGraw Hill tests just for fun but that was more of a general practice rather than a test practice. P.S. don’t worry too much about the practice test scores as you see mine are all over the place, just make sure that you are prepared for the curveballs that will be thrown at you.

Edited August 12, 2021 by GREYM

[serpentstone]

On 9/3/2019 at 1:42 AM, sarpedon2002 said:

...

I generally found Manhattan and Magoosh harder than the ETS materials. 

I took the GRE about two years ago without any studying beforehand (idiot!) and I've been preparing to retake it in about a month. I've sunk about 44 hours into Magoosh so far this summer and I'm struggling to see my scores increase more than one or two point increments. I feel so much better with several people mentioning that they feel Magoosh is more difficult than ETS. Once I retake the GRE in Sept., I'll post more about my experience with their service.

[YogaChem]

The only studying I did was the one practice test provided by them, which I got a 164Q/155V on, and took the actual test the next day and got the exact same thing