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brybear22 United States. Sep 16 2010 22:31. Posts 142 | | |
Hey guys
I have a current two year life plan which eventually leads to applying to a few structural engineering PhD programs. It is probably important to note that I am currently wrapping up my SE MS degree ATM and have previously taken the GRE with scores of 800math and 380 verbal. All of the top schools I am interested in require a 500 verbal score at a minimum.
Have any of you had success in preparing and raising this score? Atm it seems pretty daunting since my vocab is awful. Post any tips you may have.
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nixxxbg Bulgaria. Sep 16 2010 23:01. Posts 436 | | |
1. Make flash cards with all the words (~4000) from Barrons
2. Learn to read fast
3. ???
4. Profit |
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just start reading a lot of novels? |
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brybear22 United States. Sep 16 2010 23:36. Posts 142 | | |
| | On September 16 2010 22:28 Grindasaurus wrote:
just start reading a lot of novels? |
Started doing this in prep. Obv some authors would be better than others, any suggestions? I read that Neal Stephenson's books are solid for vocab so I have picked those up for the time being.... |
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Holly23 United States. Sep 16 2010 23:54. Posts 150 | | |
While in undergraduate school my college offered a semester long GRE course. I really recommend taking something like this to increase your score. It really helped me..... |
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jkoester United States. Sep 17 2010 02:03. Posts 13 | | |
I'm in grad school in Civil Engineering at a good university and got in with a very similar score to you. I don't know that I'd really worry about it. Buy the flashcards and get to know them if you really want to improve your verbal score. Many of the universities are more focused on your writing score though. Buy one of the prep books and take all the practice tests. But you need to do these things like 2-3 months before the tests if you want to see improvement. You can't just study the week before like you can with the EIT/FE.
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bober1 United States. Sep 17 2010 03:08. Posts 666 | | |
I took the GRE's and for the verbal i just memorized vocab from kaplans most common words for like 2 weeks and did a few practice tests and did decent on it. If you just go through multiple practice tests and get good at the reading parts then theres no way you won't get a 500 even with a shitty vocab (can still get a lot of the sentence completions...analogies will prob mess you up but it doesn't really matter). I just went through the whole phd admissions process and it seems that the gre's aren't super important so i wouldn't stress about it. |
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thumbz555 United States. Sep 17 2010 04:43. Posts 3281 | | |
Studied kaplan's book for a few weeks before the exam w/the flashcards, got like a 540 verbal. Ship it imo |
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Uptown . Sep 17 2010 23:50. Posts 3557 | | |
Time management is the most important thing. Also, understanding the fact that the first 10 questions of the test are super important, will be crucial as well.
I personally hate the GRE b/c I blow at vocab. For vocab, you can't do anything other than pure memorization and some basic "techniques" that any Princeton Review / Kaplan book will show you. For reading passages, the techniques are more useful.
Fwiw my score was 800 math, 660 verbal iirc.
Assessing your weak areas and figuring out which questions take you huge amounts of time are very important.
GL! |
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Uptown . Sep 17 2010 23:51. Posts 3557 | | |
oh, btw iirc I memorized 600 words over the course of 2 months when I took the GRE. |
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