Earlier this semester, I took a drive on a Monday morning to Wolf Road and embarked on one of the most intimidating experience of my life: taking the GREs.
Like all my fellow seniors, I have spent three years working hard, getting grades, and keeping up. But my three years at RPI haven’t come close to preparing me for this test. The GREs are presented in a similar format as the SATs—something we all had to take on years ago—but I was completely at a loss as to how to prepare.
As it turns out, the classes I had been taking did worlds of good for the quantitative section. As a math major, I have been working with numbers, variables, and equations, so I was all set when the computer-based GREs spit questions out at me.
Nothing at RPI, though, prepared me for the verbal section. Although it carries the same name as the section on the SATs, it is worlds different. Instead of relatively simple analogies, the GREs carry antonyms. The reading comprehension asks less about what the passage is saying and more about what the passage implies. The themes on the reading comprehensions are difficult to extract, so this part is not as simple as the SATs. The worst part about the verbal section, though, is the enormous size of the word bank, which makes the verbal section the most difficult of the three for RPI students.
At this point, you may be asking, “What do you mean three? There’s only math and verbal, right?” No, there’s an additional writing section, the analytical, which is graded on a scale of one to six. This is the hardest of the sections to prepare for. It consists of two parts, an opinion essay and an analysis of a presented argument.
When you sit down to take this section, you are presented two choices for topics to write on. This is less a research paper and more of an opinion piece, which is difficult to come up with off the cuff. You may not get a topic that you care about, which would leave your essay dry and lifeless. After you finish your persuasive piece, you are presented an argument and asked to find flaws in it. This is the part that left the most questions in my mind; I was turning the section around in my mind looking for a flaw that I may have failed to point out.
Which leaves me to this advice to you: start studying early. Building up your vocabulary is something that takes time, it is not something that can happen in the course of a week or even a month. Another good way to prepare for the GRE is to take practice exams, or even planning on taking the GREs more than once. If you plan on taking the GREs multiple times, remember the restrictions: make sure you remember your application deadlines; you can only take the GREs once a month, and a limited number of times per year; and it’s not cheap to take, so make sure you’re prepared each and every time you take the stressful trip down to the testing center.
