Some general GRE questions
Sorry to bombard this community with more typical GRE questions.
I have a lot of questions. They are random and have not been asked before (as far as I know). My actual questions are underlined.
I would especially appreciate responses from people who had similar paper-based practice scores (how your actual scores turned out), people who know how to appropriately respond to the two math questions, or people who studied Barron's 3500.
So, I'll be taking the GREs in exactly two weeks. I've been an SAT/ACT tutor since freshman year, so I haven't prepared all that much yet because of the subconscious overconfidence that comes with teaching standardized tests for a living. I've always been a good test-taker, but I think it's the set-up of the GREs that makes me so nervous - I'm just so afraid of making a stupid mistake on one of the early questions and getting a far lower score than I should. On paper-based practice tests thus far, I've averaged between 610 and 660 in Verbal and between 690 and 760 in Math. However, most of the people here have been saying they've always scored higher on CATs than on paper-based practices. Is this true of mostly everyone? For anyone who was in my range on the paper-based, how did your actual scores turn out?
[I have not yet completed a CAT practice test. I am waiting to do those all next week, after I spend this week studying. I know people have said that PowerPrep seems to be the most reliable, but I have not yet completed one of those practices.]
This is my plan for the next two weeks:
VERBAL:
I'm in the process of finishing up flashcards for every single word of Barron's 3500 that I didn't previously know (which ended up being about 20 words from each word list). So, I'll have ~1000 words to study, and I have a fairly good memory / studying ability, so I feel confident my vocabulary will be buffed up by the time of the test. (I had not yet studied these when I took any of those paper-based practice tests.) Opinions from people who studied Barron's 3500 and how they felt taking the test?
MATH:
Math is my thing. But I sometimes still manage to score something outrageously shitty in the high 600s (shitty in regards to percentile and to the fact that my area is math-oriented). When I look over the mistakes I made, about 85% of them are careless errors, no matter how careful I thought I was being when I took the test. What are some strategies for avoiding careless errors?
Additionally, I've read over strategies in Kaplan/PR/Barron's for quicker ways to go about solving problems, and I'm successful with most of them. There are rarely problems I don't know how to do at all, but sometimes, I'll see a problem that I can't come up with a quick way to figure out. For example:
The reflection of 123 is 321. Which of the following must the difference between a five-digit number and its reflection always be divisible by?
2
4
6
8
9
Uh. Okay? It's obvious how to take five minutes to figure out this problem, but what's an easier way?
Also, how do you deal with situations in which there could be two interpretations of something? For instance, some people would say 24 has 8 factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24), but some would say it has 16 (all of those, plus the negative versions of them). So what if the question was this:
Column A: Number of factors of 24
Column B: 8
Third, has anyone encountered problems involving sequences/combinations/permutations on the GRE? They're on the SATs, so I teach them to kids all the time, but I never bothered to memorize the formulas myself.
WRITING:
I've barely prepared for this at all yet. I just read information about it in some of my prep books, but I haven't written any practice essays. How many times would you suggest writing practice essays before the test? My writing is generally coherent, though I'm sure some of you would disagree after reading this post, hah.
Random question: I read in one of the prep books that the score generated by the CAT is actually the score at which a person could successfully answer half of the questions correctly. Is this true?
I have a lot of questions. They are random and have not been asked before (as far as I know). My actual questions are underlined.
I would especially appreciate responses from people who had similar paper-based practice scores (how your actual scores turned out), people who know how to appropriately respond to the two math questions, or people who studied Barron's 3500.
So, I'll be taking the GREs in exactly two weeks. I've been an SAT/ACT tutor since freshman year, so I haven't prepared all that much yet because of the subconscious overconfidence that comes with teaching standardized tests for a living. I've always been a good test-taker, but I think it's the set-up of the GREs that makes me so nervous - I'm just so afraid of making a stupid mistake on one of the early questions and getting a far lower score than I should. On paper-based practice tests thus far, I've averaged between 610 and 660 in Verbal and between 690 and 760 in Math. However, most of the people here have been saying they've always scored higher on CATs than on paper-based practices. Is this true of mostly everyone? For anyone who was in my range on the paper-based, how did your actual scores turn out?
[I have not yet completed a CAT practice test. I am waiting to do those all next week, after I spend this week studying. I know people have said that PowerPrep seems to be the most reliable, but I have not yet completed one of those practices.]
This is my plan for the next two weeks:
VERBAL:
I'm in the process of finishing up flashcards for every single word of Barron's 3500 that I didn't previously know (which ended up being about 20 words from each word list). So, I'll have ~1000 words to study, and I have a fairly good memory / studying ability, so I feel confident my vocabulary will be buffed up by the time of the test. (I had not yet studied these when I took any of those paper-based practice tests.) Opinions from people who studied Barron's 3500 and how they felt taking the test?
MATH:
Math is my thing. But I sometimes still manage to score something outrageously shitty in the high 600s (shitty in regards to percentile and to the fact that my area is math-oriented). When I look over the mistakes I made, about 85% of them are careless errors, no matter how careful I thought I was being when I took the test. What are some strategies for avoiding careless errors?
Additionally, I've read over strategies in Kaplan/PR/Barron's for quicker ways to go about solving problems, and I'm successful with most of them. There are rarely problems I don't know how to do at all, but sometimes, I'll see a problem that I can't come up with a quick way to figure out. For example:
The reflection of 123 is 321. Which of the following must the difference between a five-digit number and its reflection always be divisible by?
2
4
6
8
9
Uh. Okay? It's obvious how to take five minutes to figure out this problem, but what's an easier way?
Also, how do you deal with situations in which there could be two interpretations of something? For instance, some people would say 24 has 8 factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24), but some would say it has 16 (all of those, plus the negative versions of them). So what if the question was this:
Column A: Number of factors of 24
Column B: 8
Third, has anyone encountered problems involving sequences/combinations/permutations on the GRE? They're on the SATs, so I teach them to kids all the time, but I never bothered to memorize the formulas myself.
WRITING:
I've barely prepared for this at all yet. I just read information about it in some of my prep books, but I haven't written any practice essays. How many times would you suggest writing practice essays before the test? My writing is generally coherent, though I'm sure some of you would disagree after reading this post, hah.
Random question: I read in one of the prep books that the score generated by the CAT is actually the score at which a person could successfully answer half of the questions correctly. Is this true?