GRE Preparation:
(my score: 1480-->q790+v690+awa3.5)
note::
Nevertheless, your GRE score is also a significant part of your application and a good score helps you 'gain admission'/'makeup' your low acad score.
VOCAB section:
do mug up ALL the words from barrons. This might seem crazy at the beginning but you can do this. Infact many people revise the wordlists 3-4 times before they give the GRE.
Remember one point : If you are leaving out words, you are leaving your points in the GRE too......
the key for mugging up words is "repetetive revision" i.e ----"you might forget the word for the 1st time, u might forget the 2nd time, ... 3rd time, 4th time... but you will definitely remember it the next time..."
Mugging up all the words in Barrons is quite easy compared to the RC (Reading Comprehension) section. its possible to mug up all the words within 20 days but its not the case with RC. U need a good practice of RC more than 1 month(approx).
But is it for sure that, with the newly introduced pattern you cannot score marks only by mugging up the words in barrons.In fact the section title has been changed to verbal reasoning. This is a very important thing to be noted. First mug up then understand them.
RC prep:
generally in their preparation, people focus a lot on strategies to approach the given passage. i.e "apply strategy1 for this passage and strategy2 for another kind of passage/question".... all this is really bullshit. Strategies only help you with 10% of your RC prep.
PRACTICE is the most imp. thing. The more passages you do, the better u get day by day.
Initially when u start wid your RC practice... dont bother abt the time..... take all the time you need.....and solve all the questions of a particular passage.....a common phenomenon you see when you slove RC's is that ....for a passage, u might get most of the questions correct (OR) you get most of em wrong....this is because of the interpretation you make from that passage...... if you do it correctly...u get most of em right but if you interpret them wrong.....u'll endup solving most of the questions incorrectly. you will notice for yourself the increase of your reading (comprehending) speed...... now when you feel that you are doing good enough....then focus a bit more about the time you take to solve a passage.... try to improve your speed but not at the cost of comprehending the passage..... even on my actual gre, i tried not to get tensed in my RC section and i took all the time for comprehending the passage properly..... i covered up this time in Antonyms/Analogies section.
Generally ppl think that they are 'losing' time when they do the RC section and tend to increase their reading pace at the cost of their comprehension. out of 28 questions, there will be approx. 8 ANTONYMS. if you know the word, then u can figure out the antonym in less than 10 secs......so, u can(should) spend more time on RC to get things correct....
u will also get a free CD from ETS if you book a date for the test.....this has "POWERPREP" software.... u can also download it for free from ets.org ..... this software along with 2 full length tests.... it has got a "Practice" section..... which includes all the sections including RC's ..... plz go through the RC section which has answers including their EXPLANATIONS..... doing so ... u get to know the approach of solving an RC question.
on the whole::: the key to crack the VOCAB section of the gre is to PRACTICE and PRACTICE and PRACTICE and again PRACTICE a lot.
Practice material:
GRE barrons +
'BIG BOOK' (for practice). you can even find the softcopy of 'big book' on the internet for free.....(try ARES,LIMEWIRE,torrent stuff....etc...) +
INTERNET (orkut too) (awesome resource for anything u need)
SOFTWARES like... kaplan, princeton, arco, cambridge etc...
'Big Book' is out of print today.... u have to ask your friends and their friends for this thing. For NIT - Bhopal students, u can get it in Old Bhopal (second hand book stalls near MOTI MASJID)..... many of my juniors have the BIG BOOK soft copy with them......
QUANT section (math):
There is a misconception among many students that Math section is a cake walk and scoring 800 is a 'bachha' thing..... but its not so..... many sudents in my batch got 720,750, 780 etc.
The point is that ..... the concepts involved in solving the problems are very simple and the level of the questions is also moderate BUT all the questions are very very TRICKY. you will be 101% sure about an answer of a math question ... but you will get it wrong...... such is the case wid all the math questions. i scored 790 in this section but i still had 7 wrong answers (Thanks to the adaptive nature of the test)........
There's no need to practice exclusively (except for wierd topics like mean, median, mode etc..)for math section. Its enough if you give practice tests on computer and analyze them properly....by doing this... u get to know your pit falls in the math section....
Step by step procedure:
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1 comments:
most simple and useful advice, i have came across. highly inspiring too!
thanks..
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