practice gre and real gre difference

[rileypep]

how many points did you increase or decrease on the real GRE from your practice/diagnostic tests?

im been making 620~ on the math section and trying to see how much i can realisticly improve in a month and half.

My verbal is really bad at the moment too (4xx) ;-(. ill be taking a class in june so hopefully that will greatly increase my scores

[ec86]

It depends on which test prep software you are using. PowerPrep was basically bang on for me. However, it seemed like the commercially available prep tests are harder on the Q (I scored 100 points lower on these than I did on the actual thing).

I used the Princeton Review 400ish high frequency, high difficulty word list. Studied the vocab for an hour or two each day and did practice test/question sets each day for 2 months and brought up the V score by 200 points. I highly recommend that book (Word Power, I think it was called) if you are short on studying time. Otherwise, use the Barron 4000+ word list.

[Dreams]

I used PowerPrep also and the GRE sample test booklets that I had from ETS. They were pretty much indicative of what I faced on the exam. The Verbal section is a strange beast. I would say not only review words, but also the word patterns you will see on that section.

[ec86]

Right, studying word patterns is definitely a good strategy. There's a lot of recurring themes that they use for antonyms and analogies.

The most difficult section in Verbal, I found, was reading comprehension. The sciency passages were A-OK, but the literary stuff was brutally boring (no offense) and thus hard to pay attention to the details. A lot of time was wasted re-reading those latter kinds of passages.

[Nytusse]

I have to say that I did substantially better on the real test than I did on any of the practice tests. I am talking about hundreds of points. Maybe I'm just a freak who does better under pressure?

[Jakrabite]

The sciency passages were A-OK, but the literary stuff was brutally boring (no offense) and thus hard to pay attention to the details.

I felt otherwise. Even though I'm from a science background, I got an extremely boring marine biology passage which I just could not make myself care about. The history passage was pretty interesting though.

[UnlikelyGrad]

I took zillions of practice tests, so to make things easier for the OP I'll compare with the PowerPrep test I took the day before the real thing:

Q: same score

V: +50

The most difficult section in Verbal, I found, was reading comprehension. The sciency passages were A-OK, but the literary stuff was brutally boring (no offense) and thus hard to pay attention to the details. A lot of time was wasted re-reading those latter kinds of passages.

Reading comprehension was my bugaboo too. What I ended up doing was looking at the question first and then skimming the passage for the answer to that question--instead of trying to understand the whole selection right off the bat. I only read the whole selection if the question asked "The main idea of this passage was..." or something like that.