I just sat for the GRE for my fourth attempt. A little bit about myself, I graduated from college a year ago and had taken the GRE twice during my senior year of college. I scored a 314 on my first attempt: V156, Q158. I took it again a month later and scored V157, Q148 (had to use the bathroom which screwed me up). I decided to give up on the GRE for a while because I was stressed out about graduating and finding a job. I did manage to get interviewed by Georgetown McDonough two months after graduating. I was invited to interview for the Masters-in-Management program. However, I ended up getting waitlisted. I ended up joining the military as a reserve--I shipped out for boot camp in September 2019 and finished basic training in March 2020. It was nice. I got to go to San Diego and make new friends and have new experiences. When I finally came back home, just before the military ban was imposed, I started a new job at a defense contractor.

Anyways, I decided to retake the GRE when I got back after I heard about the opportunity to take it at home. I spent a week preparing for it after not reviewing any GRE material for months. I ended up scoring a 316: V157, V159. I was honestly pretty disappointed and thought it was ironic I scored higher on the quant. I know those scores are generally competitive, but I plan to apply to top-25 schools (Yale SOM, Dartmouth, Chicago, Georgetown, Cornell). A 316 is barely within the 80% curve for most of those schools (not including Yale) so I knew if I wanted to stand a chance at those schools I would have to retake. The thing that has bugged me the most about this test is that I'm normally told I have a big vocabulary. And yet, despite my vocabulary, I kept scoring sub-160 while seeing all these foreign students score above 160+. Seeing these posts on Youtube was really painful, especially considering I was put in a spelling bee program in third grade because of my knack for language. Anyways, after scoring a 316 I knew something had to change about my approach to verbal. I took memorizing vocabulary a lot more seriously and used a variety of resources.

- Magoosh Vocab Builder
- Manhattan 5LBS
- Barrons 800
- Prep Scholar 357
- All ETS tests (2 free and 3 Powerprep Plus)

During my previous prep, I was reluctant to study from these lists because I assumed I would be fine because of my "big" vocabulary. I took a lazy approach and maybe memorized only 50 words. And yet several words appeared on my previous tests that I didn't know (callow, prodigal, profligate, reprobate). I buckled down and systematically took hand notes to memorize Barrons 800. Rather than writing out definitions, though, I defined words through synonyms. For example, I would write down "Prodigal: Profligate or Pellucid: Lucid: Translucent." This helped me cut to the chase and identify synonym pairs in Sentence Equivalence much quicker. What can be so discouraging about the verbal section is that even though ETS tends to use a pool of words, which Barron's 800 and Magoosh do a very good job of listing, only like 4-8 words from that list will actually appear on your test. The rest will be secondary definitions of common words; one such pair that came up on my test today, for example, was "manifest and obvious." Also, I realized I wasn't paying attention to key context clues in text completion. One interesting thing I learned about text completion is that the correct answers can sometimes create a sentence that just sounds flat-out weird to native speakers, and, the answers for harder questions tend to be correct in a very literal sense. It's really important to pay attention to adjectives, adverbs, and transition words in both Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion.

I hope this is not some fluke by ETS. I am still in disbelief...I could not believe I saw a 165 on the verbal when I was finished. Now, it usually takes a week for your scores to be available on ETS. It took about a week and a half until I could see my scores between the time I took my last test and the time when they were finally posted on ETS. I am boycotting ETS if I see anything different. At the end of the day, it really helped me to remember that the GRE is just a test. Don't freak out by all these high scores you see on MBA Livewire or Greclubprep. Not only are some of those probably fake reports, but there are many ways a person can achieve a high composite score. There are also many ways different score breakdowns can be interpreted by admissions committees or even ways how other aspects of your application can contextualize these scores (coming from a low-income demographic, being an international student, being a minority). Luckily, quite a few MBA programs super score, or at least consider your highest section scores across all attempts. I know my quant was nothing out of the ordinary, but according to the bell curve at Yale SOM it is still within range so hopefully I can build a strong application in years to come. Regardless of what school I go to, or even if I end up going, I am glad to have scored this on verbal. This was my dream score, and I really wanted to do well because of my love for words and the fond memories of childhood studying vocabulary invokes--studying for my first spelling bee.

As an addendum, I never kept up with the advanced spelling program I was put in. After third-grade things fell apart, lol. I did very poorly in high school because I was obsessed with sports and I had to go to community college to transfer to a T-50 school in DC.