Source
r/GRE•
wadowsky

Focused a ton of energy on reading comp but in the end, most of my wrong answers were vocab questions as evidenced by the diagnostic report post-test (167 V) and the last practice tests I took. Morale: learn new words every day.

Advice / Protips :redditgold:

Title pretty much explains it. Got a solid verbal score, 167, so that was good. Avg practice tests were 162-165 for verbal, so that’s even better. Improvement on test day, yay!

That said, I was obsessing over reading comp and considered that to be my weakest skill. Did plenty of flash cards and stuff, but in the end mostly drilled RC. Now got my diagnostic report and out of the questions I got wrong, most were actually vocab questions (sentence equivalence and fill the gaps). I personally think RC gives a much better overview of a person’s intelligence than just knowing random fancy words, but that is namely what ETS is testing. Got quite a few “fill 3 blanks” sentences wrong especially.

So keep learning new words! You can really coast on that even if RC actually is your weakest skill.

Posted Apr 24, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

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wadowskyOP•

Lol moral not morale but I’m done with this stuff so the title stays the way it is! 🤓

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giraffeman91169 V / 161 Q / 5.5•

It’s perfect the way it is.

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gregmatTutor / Expert (339, 6.0)•

How do you know you got those questions wrong because of vocabulary? Sentence equivalence and text completion questions also require the ability to discern sentence logic.

Nice score btw!

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wadowskyOP•

That is true but I recall stumbling and not knowing what certain words meant. So if you have 3 blanks it’s very easy to get it wrong 🙁

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tractatus25V: 169, Q: 167, AW: 6.0•

It's always a deficient vocabulary, lol.

Great score though, and nice improvement over PT's. If you don't mind me asking, how many total questions did you miss on verbal? Breakdown by SE/TC and RC? Always curious about the range of verbal curves.

Some verbal iterations have challenging vocabulary, and this is a possibility for which everyone should prepare. If you retake, I am sure you will ace it (and you already got a great score). And there's more to SE/TC, in particular TC, than vocabulary. Much more than SAT sentence completion, GRE SE/TC tests the ability to discern sentence logic.

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wadowskyOP•

I had 6 incorrect answers total (1 in first section and 5 in the second section) for a score of 167 V! That's quite a bit of wiggle room innit...especially compared to math. 4 TC/SE and 2 RC. All difficulty 5 basically.

I got 167 V / 156 Q / 5.0 AWA. Considered retaking the test if the AWA had been low(er), but once that score came in, I was like F it. I have a BA and an MA in art history and cultural studies, eyeing an interdisciplinary PhD program from a communications/narrative study angle. High GPAs. Non-native speaker and haven't touched math in 14 years since I was 18. So I think the score is indicative of who I am as a person actually. Math not embarrassing, not awesome, but decent for someone who started from scratch with a FT job and verbal great for an ESL gal/humanities background is evident. Only applying to 2 programs and one of them just dropped the GRE, the other's cutoff is 310. So yeah, I am done here :D

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sadgrelife•

You did amazing though! Do you know usually what AWA score most schools find acceptable? I find most programs' websites just mention the average percentile for Verbal and Quant...

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wadowskyOP•

from what i've read, anything above 4.0 is considered OK? but it's the least important section. unless maybe you're a hardcore stem person with 170 Q applying for stem programs and everything else looks good, in which case a 3.5 could be considered you having a bad day or something :D

I actully thought i bombed the writing because the issue essay prompt was something about politicians, principles vs compromise yaddi yaddi. my gre was preceded by 3 hours of proctor U tech troubleshooting so when we finally got the test to work, i couldnt believe it and then had to write this text. i wrote something about gun control and border wall, a highly dumb, politicized text, similar to someone's random facebook rant and I thought it really sucked. But I produced 6 paragraphs of text so I think length is key honestly. or what they call stream of consciousness in psychoanalysis. gregmat has some good tips on how to structure on his youtube channel

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tractatus25V: 169, Q: 167, AW: 6.0•

Nice. Sounds like a reasonable decision. Best of luck with applications.

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Scott_TargetTestPrepPrep company•

Either way, you must be thrilled with V167! Nice work!!

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