gre practice tests

GRE Prep for Oak’s Students: Reading Comprehension Practice in the Last 2 Months

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Practice for Reading Comprehension on the GRE

Once you have completed your preliminary reading, you should have gained several benefits:

  • exposure to fields outside your normal reading
  • knowledge of terms and concepts; personalities, processes, phenomena; and in general ideas and things in those unfamiliar fields
  • an ability to handle complex sentence structure and phrasing
  • an ability to understand the structure of passages and the modes of reasoning used and to understand the author’s main point.

Once you have attained some level of comfort on these fronts, you are ready to tackle the GRE reading comprehension passages in the practice material. The order in which you will do this final material is as follows.

  • Medium-level GRE Reading Comprehension
  • Hard GRE Reading Comprehension
  • ETS Material

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GRE Prep for Oak’s Students: Plan for Taking Practice Computer-Based Tests

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CBT – Practice on the Computer-Based Tests (1 month before GRE test)

The final stage of your GRE prep is taking practice GRE computer-based tests. If you are a student at Dilip Oak’s Academy, here is the plan – if you’re not, you are missing out!

  • Start doing the Computer-based tests 3 weeks-1 month before the GRE.
  • There are 10 Oaks tests (5 to be taken in the lab and 5 online) and two PowerPrep tests from the ETS, making a total of 12.
  • Going through all of them, at the rate of one every 2-3 days will take about a month.

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Cracking the GRE Test – a Working Student’s Experience – Debanjana Nayak (GRE Score 330/340)

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Trophy GRE ScoreThis week’s blog is by another of our high scorers, Debanjana Nayak who got a a really great score of 330/340. What makes this score a special one is that Debanjana is working.

So, this post is especially for all the working folks: if you are in a job and feel it might be difficult for you to prepare, here’s some inspiration! (By the way this post is just the first part. More to follow!)

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Before, I start with my tips, here is a bit on my background. I graduated with an Electronics and Communication Engineering degree from WBUT in 2010 and soon after joined Tech Mahindra as a Technical Associate. I have been working there for almost 2 years now.

After having worked in the company for about 1 year, I decided to pursue higher studies in the US (targeting fall 2013). Since I intended to keep my job and prepare for the exams (GRE & TOEFL) side-by-side, I started preparation early, around October, 2011, almost 7 months in advance. I finally gave my GRE on 25th April, 2012. My scores are as follows:

  • Quantitative – 166/170
  • Verbal – 164/170
  • AWM – 4/6

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Cracking the GRE: Tips from Tanmay – GRE Score 335

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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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GRE Score – 337/340: Ashwin’s Tips for Cracking the GRE (Part 2)

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TrophyThis 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).

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GRE Test Prep: Reading Comprehension and Discrete Questions: Challenges & Tips

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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?

Challenge #1: Reading Comprehension Passages

Screenshot of a Reading Comprehension question in the Revised General GRE
Reading Comprehension Question

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:

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