I have given the GRE twice and unfortunately I might have to give it again in case I get admitted to a specific university which has a cutoff. Here’s my background along with how I prepared.
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First Attempt
I prepared for less than a week, did the ETS math review guide, mugged up 100 most frequent GRE words from a list online. Did some practice. Score: 158V, 158Q, 3.5 AWA -
Second Attempt
I was extremely shocked by my quant score and a little disappointed by my AWA. I needed a 165Q+, 4.0AWA and recognized that I needed a lot of work. I had submission deadlines for many unis soon so I gave on the next possible date 20 days later.
For quant I went through all flashcards multiple times, I did a lot of prepswift but it wasn’t particularly organized. I think this was the right approach due to my lack of time. For any topic where I felt weak I did all quiz and noted down the mistakes I made.
For AWA, I practiced a ton. It took a week of practice before ChatGPT started giving me 4.0 consistently rather than a 3.5 but it still happened occasionally. I don’t think I’m a bad writer but, the GRE format didn’t sit well with me. I like to think long and hard, write multiple drafts and spend time refining it. That however isn’t possible here. On top of that I was making a lot of spelling and grammatical mistakes. I never realized how many mistakes I am capable of making without a text processor. I also had a lot of trouble coming up with ideas for the essay. ChatGPT was really helpful in suggesting points which I could use to refine my own thought process. Greg has mentioned many times that it doesn’t matter which side you take or what your real opinion is. Fair, I know that but for the GRE we can just write a bullshit logically flawed point which is easily rebuttable but it’s all good. Perfect training to be a politician. There is nobody to evaluate the quality and merit of your content. Anyways, if you are having trouble with AWA and need a specific score you can consider using ChatGPT as your personal trainer. With practice you can limit your vocabulary to words whose spellings you confidently know, improve flow and iterate over ideas. The issue pool is fixed, 152 topics in total so could even brute force it. I did over 70 topics but just the 3-5 minutes per topic to only come up with points. The topics can be classified into something like 10-15 themes and many topics are minor variations on that so at least have a look at each theme.
By the end I was getting 157V, 167Q in my powerprep tests and 4.0’s in my ChatGPT AWA eval. Like last time I mugged up the same 100 most frequent words 2 days before the exam.
My score was: 154V, 165Q, 5.0 AWA
I wasn’t paying tons of attention in my first verbal section because I wanted to preserve my energy for the quant section. I ended up with 4 correct in the first section and all correct in the second one.
- Now
Now my problem is that the cutoff is 155V, 165Q, 3.5 AWA. While Greg recommends doing the entire mountain irrespective of the score target I don’t think I have the time.I also need to get 165Q+ again which will require constant work, a bad score is just one slip away. Because my score was very close I think a commitment of 40-45 hours over the next month is fine.
I’m gonna watch the vocab mountain video and the elite quant score video today. I’d definitely appreciate a game plan.
The report needs to reach the university by 19th August. So working out the math I can give one attempt on 14th July, if that fails I can try again on the 4th of August so the correct score gets reported on time.
I’ve attached my diagnosis report for both tests.
Report.pdf (320.1 KB)