Here are some more hot tips from one of our students who is a star performer on the GRE. This time it’s Tanmay Gurjar. As you can see, his performance has won him another of our ‘gold medals’! First here is a brief ‘bio’.
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Name: Tanmay Gurjar
Stream/College: Bachelor’s, Mechanical Engineering, COEP (currently in final year)
GRE Score: 335
Break up – Quant – 169, Verbal – 166
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This week we bring you the second part of a really trophy-winning article: Ashwin’s tips for cracking the GRE.
In this part he gets even more specific, with tips for the Practice Tests and each of the sections – Analytical Writing, Quantitative Reasoning and the super-hard Verbal Reasoning section. Read on. There are literally dozens of pointers that you can really benefit from.
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Tips for the Practice Tests
1) If you haven’t given exams like Pravinya, MTS, NTS etc. the GRE exam may be a new experience. If that is so, I would advise you to give one of the mock tests within a week of finishing classes just in order to know where you stand (editor’s note: you can use the Oak’s free test for this purpose).
2) Practice, practice, practice. The more preparation you do the better you will score. It just works that way. There are studies that show if you prepare just one hour beyond the point where you feel you know everything, you can increase your marks by up to 5% (which is significant in an exam like this one).
The ETS sends your score to four universities free. But, if you want to sent Additional GRE Score Reports (ASRs) to more universities, you have to order them by mail or by phone. Here’s how.
REGISTERING FOR THE GRE TEST
There are four ways you can register for the computer-based General Test.
1. Online Registration
The easiest and fastest way to register is online. Test takers with credit cards can register online at:
For students who have given the GRE several times, the worry has always been that the universities they are sending the scores to will see their bad scores along with their good ones. Now, however that is going to change.
The ETS has introduced a feature which it calls the ScoreSelectSM Option which allows you to select which GRE scores you want to send to the universities and colleges you are applying to. Here are the details according to ETS :
Those numbers are important because they are part of the changes that make Analytical Writing (earlier called the Analytical Writing Measure) trickier and more demanding on the Revised General GRE,which was released in August last year.
So, what are the changes? Firstly as noted above, the essay section is now called just Analytical Writing (or AW for short). The ETS has been making changes in various aspects of the GRE test to make it more like the GMAT. This is one of them. The second is that the Issue Essay is now just for 30 minutes rather than 45 as earlier. This again, makes the GRE more like the GMAT.
But the ‘6’ and ‘8’ are part of a feature that is entirely unique to the Analytical Writing section of the Revised General GRE test. The numbers come in because now instead of one question type for the Issue Essay, you now have 6, and instead of one question type for the Argument Essay you now have 8. Each of the question types directs the test-taker to do or comment on something very specific relating to the given topic – and in their introductory material the ETS repeatedly states that test-takers should follow the specific directions given for the topic, so obviously it is important that you better know exactly what each question type demands and also how to meet the specific requirements.
To find out more official information about this from the ETS visit the following link:
http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/about/content/analytical_writing
For our perspective, wait for our upcoming blogs on the Issue and Argument Tasks. Till then, happy hunting as you check out the ETS’s requirements for the tweaked and tricky AW section!
Related Links
Quantitative Reasoning in the Revised General GRE, like Verbal Reasoning has two sections with 20 questions each and for which 35 minutes solving time is given per section. Each Quantitative Reasoning section has mix of question types:
This makes a total of 7 different formats which are illustrated in the screenshots below. The screenshots are of the Dilip Oak’s Online test, but they will give you a good idea of what these formats will look like when you take the GRE computer-based test.
So, you are preparing for the GRE test. You know that the Verbal section is going to be demanding. What are the big challenges in the Verbal section of the Revised General GRE?
First, a bit of good bit of news: the Reading Comprehension passages on the Revised GRE test are short. A Verbal section generally contains 5 Reading Comprehension passages, most which are 20-25 lines long; and one of them may be as short as 3-5 lines. The longest passages are of about 40 lines or so. (See ETS’s introduction to reading comprehension, sample questions and tips)
But Reading Comprehension is never very easy. Firstly, the passages cover a wide variety of topics, most of which are very unfamiliar. Here are some topics that have appeared in the past:
When the Revised General GRE test was launched (way back on 1 August 2011), a whole host of changes was introduced. One consequence was a revamped Verbal Reasoning part in which there are now:
To sum up, Reading Comprehension is now more important, the Sentence Completion type questions got a little harder to get right and Vocabulary is more or less just as important as it was earlier – so, you still have to learn that GRE word list!). As a result of those two changes, students also find the Verbal section harder to complete on time. So, how do you handle that difficulty?
The GRE test, conducted by ETS, is one of the world’s most widely used tests for admission to universities both in America and worldwide. On 1 August 2011, the ETS introduced the Revised GRE test. This exam lasts for about 4 hours and consists of 3 major of section types:
