Help with improving score in GRE?

The GREs are a pain in the ass, but they’re very beatable (even much more so than the SATs) if you’re dedicated, and it seems worth it to put a lot of effort into beating them. It’s going to mean much higher chances of admission and more money while you’re in grad school.

Basically, your method of studying is going to depend on where you’re at now, and you seem to need more help with verbal. You already have some study materials, which are hopefully the same ones I am about to recommend. The most comprehensive and best is Barron’s: http://www.amazon.com/Barrons-CD-ROM-Prepare-Graduate-Examination/dp/0764179497/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195054937&sr=8-1

MATH:

If you’re good with math to begin with, you’re not going to need to do much review. Your best bet is to take a math practice test everyday (and time yourself—the math section takes 45 minutes), and then review your mistakes. Keep doing this until you’re consistently making high scores on math.

If you’ve forgotten most of the math concepts from high school, you’re going to need to do a comprehensive review of math concepts. All of the math problems are applications of mostly algebra and geometry. The best way to review these concepts is to use Kaplan’s Math Workbook: http://www.amazon.com/Kaplan-GRE-Math-Workbook-Sixth/dp/1427795045/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195055081&sr=1-1
You can go through each chapter to review the concepts and then test yourself using GRE-type problems.

Regarding problem types on the math portion of the GRE, there are multiple choice word problems and quantitative comparisons. The word problems are self-explanatory, but the you might make the quantitative comparisons more difficult than they are if you don’t know how to work ‘em.

In quantitative comparisons, you need to compare two columns, and the answer choices are as follows:
A if Column A is greater
B if Column B is greater
C if they are equal
D if it cannot be determined

Your key here is reading strategies in Barron’s to quickly compare the two columns without doing complete calculations. The other big key is to (if the questions involve variables), try numbers in each of them that are positive, negative, and zero. Since answers can come out differently depending on the sign of the number you plug in, you need to try variations of these to see if one column ALWAYS comes out greater. If you get that column A is greater when you plug in a positive number, but column B is greater when you plug in a negative number, for instance, the answer is D—that it cannot be determined. (Because it would be different, depending on what the variable represented.)

VERBAL:

Verbal is 70% vocabulary, 30% reading comprehension. With a few practices of reading comprehension passages and questions, you should be completely fine with those questions, but the vocabulary questions aren’t so pretty. I had a broad vocabulary to begin with, but many of the words were still way over my head. I can’t imagine that anyone is familiar with the majority of the words tested on the GRE without studying. Barron’s list of 3500 vocabulary words is the most effective study tool for this. The only way to do exceptionally well on the Verbal part of the GREs is to work from an extensive list of vocab words, learning the ones you do not know. 3500 sounds like a lot, but you’re probably going to know about ⅔ of these words to begin with. So, you just need to go through the lists of words in Barron’s and learn the words you don’t know. There are 50 lists, each with 70 words, so ideally, you could take a list a day and learn the words you don’t know. ALL of the words that would appear on the GRE are on these lists; believe me. So if you master just a list a day until the time of your test, you should kill the Verbal section also. The verbal questions are antonyms, sentence completions, and analogies.

ESSAYS:

There are two essays: the Issue essay and the Argument essay. For the Issue essay, you are given a choice of two quotes, and you basically have to develop a five-paragraph essay which explains your position either in support of or disagreement with the quote. Use examples from literature, history, or other fields, to support your stance in the body paragraphs.

In the argument essay, you will be given a paragraph that presents an argument, and you have to write an essay that documents the logical flaws in the argument. Basically, you need to explain how Sentence A doesn’t necessarily lead to Sentence B, and so on. Your key is finding assumptions that are made (but not backed up) in the paragraph and picking the argument apart.

Finally, there are new question types that have started being added to the GRE on November 1, but don’t worry—they don’t count toward your score at this time. They’re just in the experimental stage, and you’ll only get one of them. If you get a math one, you need to fill in the answer yourself (no answer choices); if you get a verbal one, you’ll have a sentence completion that has three blanks in the sentence. This one question would appear as the last question on a section, and it does NOT count toward your score, so don’t even worry about studying for that kind.

The other thing to know is that it’s a Computer Adaptive Test, meaning that it adapts to whether you answer the questions correctly in order to determine your score. The first questions count more than the later questions because this is how it works:

The scores range from 200 to 800, so the first question you see will be at a 500 level. If you answer this correctly, your score will increase to 550, and you’ll get a harder question. If you answer that correctly, your score will go up to 580, and so on. It will keep adjusting the questions it generates based on how you’re doing, so you WANT to see them get harder. If you answer the first few incorrectly, it’s going to bring you down to the 400s or even the 300s, and answering later questions correctly is only going to bring you up slightly because it adjusts your score less and less as the test goes on. The score you see at the end is the level that your last question was at.

Great answer, @girlofscience!

It sounds like your math skills are pretty strong. Can you do some self-diagnosis and figure out where you’re losing points? Are you running out of time? Are you better at the problem-solving questions, or the quantitative comparisons?

For the verbal section, let’s talk strategy. You are completely fucked without a strong vocabulary, so start with @girlofscience‘s recommendation to use the Barrons flashcards. In the meantime, practice doing tons of reading comprehension problems. I have always found that the very best way to avoid getting talked into plausible wrong answers is to anticipate the right answer before you read the answers. Read the question. Go back to the part of the passage that it’s referring to. Think about what you think the right answer is. Then you can go through the answers, looking for the one that sounds like the prediction you just made.

The other question types will be impossible without a strong vocabulary. That said, these are very strategy-heavy as well. I think the problem that most people have with sentence completions and analogies is that they don’t see the difference between a possible relationship and a necessary relationship. In sentence completion questions, there are plenty of words you could stick in the sentence, but there’s only one that necessarily belongs in the sentence—something else in the sentence justifies the right answer. Same with analogies. There are plenty of relationships between the stem words in the question, but there’s only one necessary relationship that is true by the very definition of the two words.

Good luck. If you have specific questions post back.