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Comment by dharmon | Hacker News Reader

I only did alright on the SAT, but I smoked the GRE by doing something similar.

The Kaplan book had a CD with a few practice tests. I think I did 2. If for no other reason, they are super useful for figuring out how to pace yourself.

The math section was (is?) easy for most people on this site. This seems the norm because the score/percentile relationship was incredibly high.

The English section kills people. My pro-tip is, in the same Kaplan book, they have a list of the most common words. I made flashcards for the top 100, and I'll be damned if like 80 of them didn't show up on the test. I imagine this is similar for the SATs.

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In grad school, we took an unofficial survey of GRE verbal and quant scores. Far and away, the non English speaking students scored significantly higher than natives. Anecdotally, The non native speakers actually studied in that way you describe, and the native speakers assumed the fluency would carry its weight instead

Hi. Thanks for sharing this. I suspect that would be true for foreign students within programs across the board in the US, because you tend to learn as an outsider through an application of “rigor” and more raw memorization than higher order types of learning. I’m speaking this from experience as a foreigner who moved to the US early on. I’ve always doubted many higher order learning methods precisely because they didn’t ever distill the discipline to work better...

Weirdly, I scored completely average on the math for the GMAT despite an engineering and math degree and pretty much aced the verbal without any studying (figured out early on I needed to focus on studying quant, which I hated the test). But, I probably had a heavier English background than most people taking the test as I worked for newspapers and did a lot of personal writing for many years. Guess it's all about how you line up against the field in some cases.

This was my experience. I had an almost perfect score on the math section of the GRE, but that only landed me in the mid 80s percentile wise. On the other hand, my English score was quite a ways from perfect, but I was surprised to see that it was 98th percentile.

It definitely sucks that you can not miss a single question yet still end up with something like a 98th percentile because of the question set you happened to get.

Hi. Thank you for sharing your experience. I am about to take a GRE myself so this type of insight is very helpful. I too remember making a lot of flashcards for the SAT. I had a rather relaxed approach to studying but the consistency over time made it seem like everything I learned showed up one way or another on the test, especially vocal words.

As I'm sure you know (but maybe others don't), the main difference is that the GRE adapts to how you're doing, asking harder / easier questions when you get them right / wrong. This means the early questions have outweighed importance in your overall score and hence pacing yourself is very important. (I am very glad I did a few practice tests)

You want to leave yourself time for (hopefully) hard questions at the end, but a silly mistake early on hurts, so it pays to take your time in the first few minutes as well.

Fortunately it should be obvious how you are doing after the first group of questions, if they go from roll-your-eyes easy to ones that make you pause a moment. :)

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