Hey everyone, quick question — for those who’ve taken the actual GRE, how tricky are the synonym pairings in Text Completion? Are they usually clear-cut, moderately subtle, or the kind where ETS really plays mind games with close meanings? Also, if someone knows around 90–93% of the “vocab mountain,” what level of difficulty should they expect on test day?
Pairing is done with Sentence Equivalence questions. While there is variation and trends can change, in my experience, hard SE questions tend to derive their difficulty by either using obscure words (but not hard to pair if you know the definitions well) and/or by having multiple plausible pairs that rely on a more TC-style analysis to know which pair to choose. In extremely rare circumstances the correct pair are not direct synonyms. I think there is one example of this in one of the OG books. But once again, this is such a rare occurrence that pairing will work 99+% of the time.
To the question of how score-indicative vocab knowledge is, it depends. If you already came in with a strong vocab, that often correlates with other verbal skills, which would lead to a higher starting score. If you’re talking about the case where someone has an average vocabulary (and other average verbal skills) coming in, and exclusively studied tons of vocabulary, it might help with a very modest score increase. In other words, it is not enough to just know words—you also have to know what do with them.