July 10, 2006

Have a GRE-at time with words

Since i'm looking at grad school for the fall of 2007, i need to start worrying about the GRE. I picked up a study guide to get me up to speed. In the very first section, i learned two very disappointing facts. This first is that the math (quantitate) section of the GRE expects you to know roughly same about of math that was test on the SAT. The GRE folks assume that you didn't take any math classes in college; they just expect that you won't forget what you knew. Hence i will not get the chance to show off all the stuff i've learned in my many math classes.

Secondly, they do assume that your vocabulary has grown but they stay away from "technical" terms. Again this is frustrating because most of my classes focus on very technical words and definitions. I took the first sample test in the book and discovered that i performed poorly on the verbal section. I was quite surprised by this because i never have problems with reading comprehension in my classes. I noticed that the GRE people like to trick you with words that have alternate, less common definitions. For example, the words "list" and "flag" are often used as nouns but can also be used as intransitive verbs with very different meanings. The practice test got me scared so i'm making up flash cards from a variety of found word lists. I've never been good at route memorization but hopefully this will work.

Posted by Matthew at July 10, 2006 03:15 PM
Comments

Yes, you flash cards are a great way to memorize words. A good word list that I would recommend as a source is wordlist.gredic.com . It is very extensive, and lists all found word classes definitions for each word (e.g. if a word can be a noun, verb and adjective, it will list definitions split into these three categories).

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Posted by: simon at October 20, 2006 06:00 PM