140s to 157V and 157Q. Exam Debrief and Next Steps for 160?
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12 Mar 2023, 11:13
I took the GRE yesterday and got a 157V and 157Q. I had QVQVQ. I would love some feedback on how to improve to 160 on each section. Overall, I’ve been preparing for a little over a year while in a pretty demanding job. Most of my prep has been working on my “fundamentals”. When I started, I didn’t even know the basics of math and verbal (if someone could fail the SATs, I failed them) so I’ve been happy with how far I’ve come. However, I need to get to 160 for the MBA programs I’m aiming for.
Any and all suggestions fully welcomed!
I used TTP for quant (finished) and GregMat for verbal (finished the 1 month plan).
Quant: I feel like there was a gap in my understanding of the concepts and being able to apply them on the test. There were things on test day that I was seeing for the first time, or taking a concept in a direction I wasn’t used to.
Examples of this were:
I know how repeating decimals work (and what makes them terminate), but I didn’t know how to independently turn a repeating decimal into a fraction.
I had a decent understanding of standard deviations, but I was being asked to determine the standard deviation of different graphs / equations which I had no clue how to handle (if anyone has any resources on this, please let me know).
There was phrasing that I didn’t know how to decipher. Like, I know how to find the distance of 2 points, but I don’t know what the “distance of two graphs” means.
Verbal: I went through the GregMat lessons and the entire vocab list.
For the vocab portion, I think I need to spend more time on learning synonyms. Even after the entire vocab list, I think 40% of the vocab words were new to me on the test. I also couldn’t see clear pairings on the sentence completion part. Another area that threw me off was the how many 3 pair text completions I had (I think I had 4 in a row).
I also caught myself falling into a lot of RC traps (in one of the sections I saw that I clicked a trap answer right as I ran out of time). I’m thinking of jumping into some of the LSAT materials for RC.
So overall, it felt like I was on the peripheral of being able to answer the questions. Where my understanding was just barely not reaching the level needed for the questions. I'm not sure how to bridge this gap though.