Help needed!

[Duaa66]

Hello everyone,

I have been a long time lurker, and finally feel like I need to post something because I am extremely discouraged. I currently have a masters degree from a good university(Madison), but I didn't have to take the GRE for my program. I have decided that I want to pursue a masters/ph.d in a different field and  now need to take the GRE. I started memorizing words at the start of the summer, and have about 1000 memorized. I struggle in math  in general, so I bought a ton of books and have been studying them. Whilst I am improving in Math, I am still doing horrible when taking the practice exams. I also am doing really badly at the reading passage questions, and there are lots of words I still don't know. I am extremely overwhelmed and discouraged and don't know what to do. I have never taken a standardized teat, which makes this process even harder. I need to apply for programs at the end of December/start of January  and I feel like I am not going to ever get in anywhere because I am not improving:(

Any advice/help would be great!

 

Thanks!

[fuzzylogician]

Have you taken one of the free practice tests that the ETS website provides? This may be a good time to do so, to get an idea of how things are really going. Your anxiety might be making you believe that things are worse than they are. It's important to remember that the GRE is just a hurdle you have to pass. You don't have to excel at it. The GRE can *sometimes* keep you out if your scores are too low, but they are never what gets you into a PhD program. So the goal just needs to be "good enough." You can do that! If you can identify problems with specific sections, this might be a case where a tutor might be useful to help you get past the anxiety and pick up skills to tackle the problematic sections. But that's probably a secondary step after actually diagnosing where the difficulty is coming from. 

[Duaa66]

Thank you for your reply! I have a math tutor, only to give me piece of mind but I don't feel like he is helping. I have taken practice tests from kaplan(I have software from them). I only get about half right, which is really bad. I think the major issue is knowing what to study. I have 5 books and they have some similarities, but they are mostly very different, which is way I am overwhelmed. I thought memorizing 1000 would be good enough, but it seems like it isnt, and I didn't realize the reading passages would be as difficult as they are. I obviously am able to excell acedmically in grad school, as I already have a masters, but if I went by this test you would think I would fail out of grad school.

[fuzzylogician]

Alright, then maybe it's time to stop working with the tutor, since you don't trust him. I am not sure if finding another tutor would help you, but if so then find someone who specializes in the GRE, not just in math/English. Also, concentrate just on what matters. As a history student (if your profile is correct), the verbal score will matter much more than the math score. Maybe you should find ways to improve the speed of your reading or alternatively learn to use the questions as a guide so you can skim the parts that don't matter. I'm sure your books have some strategies for that. I would also suggest picking just one of the books and focusing on that, so you don't overwhelm yourself with all the different techniques that teach you to do basically the same thing. 

[Somnus]

Kaplan it is not really good because it is no so similar to the actual GRE. Try the ets free exams, they will give you a more accurate result, trust me, when I made the practice test I was feeling like you and I scored over 160 in both. So go on with that first.

Then, you will never learn all the words of a language, it is impossible. Try to learn as many as you can, then when you find a new word try to solve the excersise by 1) if you know 4 of 5 options you will have a very fair shot 2) does that word it is similar to another word you know? maybe the same root? This could give you a hint about if the word is the right answer or not.

Another recommendation is to read! Everything you can, articles, jokes, papers, It can help you to set your minde in a "reading mood".

For math Manhattan prep really helped me, the rest is to practice.

And finally, maybe you are just worrying for anything, do the practice test and compare your scores with the ones of the people in the program you want, maybe is similar.

 

Good luck