Just took the GREs...

[Mary Jo]

and I got 1500. (Q: 790, V: 710) A little disappointed about the verbal, and very surprised about the quantitative. At any rate, I'm glad it's over.

I'm not an international student, btw, but I found this board to be pretty helpful in allaying my fears about the exam. I didn't come across another GRE board during my 3 months of studying.

The format of the exam was bit surprising -- it wasn't exactly what the study books said, but for the better. I thought I did horribly on the quantitative section, it was a lot harder than any practice CAT that I took, and I guessed on a lot of questions. It rattled me and made me nervous for the rest of the exam.

I used most of the major study guides, and the ARCO book is terrible -- I recommend that you don't take their CAT exams the night before the GRES like I did. I bombed the ARCO exams and was worried that I wouldn't do well on the actual exam. The PowerPrep software turned out to accurately predict my score, although surprisingly my Q And V scores were reversed on the GREs.

The best tip I can say is that don't get nervous during the exam. Give yourself enough time to retake the exam if necessary, so that you won't think the exam is your last shot. Also, know your formulas and theorems cold, and don't waste your time trying to memorizing a list of 5000 words unless you have plenty of time to do so.

[Yankee]

Hi Mary Jo

Thanks for sharing your tips and experience. That's always useful for other people who are planning to take the GRE.

Congratulations on your results! They're excellent.

Amy
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Amy
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ESL teacher, translator, and a native speaker of American English

[aereal]

Huh - strange thing here - I've had GRE around a week ago, and the best preparation material turned out to be Princeton Review's "Cracking the GRE"! However, all of the Power-Prep softwares predicted my score to be around Q750, V250, while on the actual exam I got Q800 and even managed to pick up V390... (I'm international student, no wonders...)

The problem with quantitative section on the exam was that there were indeed some difficult, at the first glance, problems, and I was afraid of not having enough time, however in the end I had even some spare minutes left... the only thing needed for quantitative section is - creativity. there is always a nice and easy way to solve the problem lying nearby never try to memorize the problems, just understand the basic principles. though, it was a bit disgusting, that, first, powerpreps didn't cover certain types of the problems in the actual test (don't remember exactly, but there were some), and, second, on the actual test there were no such extremely difficult S&G problems, with hardly-visible plots, as there were in CAT preparation software...

No comment for the verbal section, though I had problems with antonyms and the fact that my score is more than 200 is, mainly, due to the reading section