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You may have heard me talking a great deal on the GRE Big Book while browsing
GRE preparation online. In this article, I would like to substantiate my stance.
I have analyzed the original GRE papers, power-prep CATS for various categories
of questions. What I did was to measure the percentage of each category in a
random paper and compare it with the overall percentages of all the papers. Now,
even to my astonishment, they match to the second decimal point. (see the
attached tables below).
But, what does this mean anyway?
Unlike CAT, civil services etc, ETS does not change the types of questions. They
stick to their patterns religiously. Even if they change, it will be very
gradual. Why? well, they have spent millions of dollars on research to prepare
appropriate questionnaires for students intending to pursue graduate studies.
Now, to change any part, they need to again back it up with that much research.
Productive Practice
What should you learn from this?
It's simple. Practice on as many real GREs as possible. They, of course, present
you with the exact levels of difficulty. But more importantly, they teach you to
spend the time the right way. What do I mean by this? Let us say you are very
weak in ratios and fractions. What should you do? Spend the same amount of time
working on both, right? Wrong. As you can read from the tables, "fractions" constitute only 2% of GRE questions whereas ratios
constitute 8%. So, ideally, you should spend 4 times more time on the latter
than the former.
You can take any general test prep guide and do this analysis on each type of
question and schedule your time accordingly. But the Big Book does this
automatically for you as it has the questions in that exact ratio.
A Source For Success
That is why your practice is a
lot more meaningful if you prepare on the real GREs, like the Big Book.
Precisely, the reason why I added solutions for 2511 Big Book questions to ATS-GRE
along with 3 CATS, application strategies, Right Universities and Scholarships.
And this is just one of the 7 such incredible
parts that the CD contains.
Click here to learn more about the GRE
CD Advantage product.
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