Now let
us see,
how you can handle the "Tougher" GRE:
First and foremost,
get this straight: GRE can never become unreasonable. ETS spends millions of
dollars researching on identifying what kind of questions it should have
in the exam. For example, in the coming years it is certain to include
a few internet jargon in its pool as any student at that level is expected
to have the familiarity with the internet. I have dealt with
this at great detail in the User manual of Placementor.com-GRE.
I have analyzed the entire Big Book and found out that ETS sticks to the
categories to the accuracy of second decimal point. Even the American Universities
are very eager to identify the best students. If for some reason
GRE got tougher, they will account for that. They will not stop
taking a student just because the GRE scores were bad and that too not
because of her fault. If you understand this
fact, a few things become a lot more clearer. The Big Book is still
considered to be the standard for GRE questions. ETS may change its format
but that is based on enormous research on students from the entire spectrum
of academic background. So, it will never ask a literature student
about the Laplace Transforms unless suddenly Laplace Transforms become
one of the core topics of all the literature students! Any change in ETS format
is predictable to certain degree. Now a days, every body is expected
to be familiar with the Internet Jargon. So, one can expect ETS
to have a few questions in this bank. So, do not go with a
mindset that the exam got tougher. If only you realize that the
exam is as it used to be, you will avoid all the silly mistakes.
This single realization helped most of our students improve the score
by 20%. And secondly do not worry
if the exam really is getting tougher. It only means that you have
been performing very well. No one punishes you for that. Keep
your cool and do not succumb to the time pressures. You will do
as well as you would have done on a PBT. Practice as many Computer
Adaptive Tests as possible. And ensure that you are working with
true CAT exams and not CBTs. I have discussed this issue in great
detail in my other free e-book All about GRE-CATs. There are very few true
CATs available. Most others are in reality CBTs though they call
themselves CATs. Power Prep of course is
one of the real CATs. The major disadvantage there is that questions are
repeated from the second attempt onwards. This does not give you
ample practice on working with the most difficult questions. The
new version of Power Prep, however, has two CATs and does provide for
a good amount of practice. As I said,
Placementor.com GRE could be one option. It
contains 3 non-repeating CATs (not even one questions repeats itself until
you take 3 full length exams) and allows you to practice unlimited number
of times. Practicing with these true CATs while knowing that the questions will
not be unreasonable will solve the psychological factors that influence
your performance. But, there is a real factor
that we found out that is affecting your performance in GRE. The
biggest problem is that you find even the easier questions very tough
on the screen. The reason is simple but profound.
You, like many
others, can read a lot more fluently on the paper than on a screen!
Conduct this simple test
on yourself. Read a particularly long page on the screen.
You can visit some of the web sites for this or read the copy that came
with this book that describes the features of Placementor.com-GRE.
See how long you can concentrate. If you are an average student,
you will take very long and probably might skip in between.
But, you just cannot afford
to skip while taking a GRE exam. You should not actually read but
study. You should study so carefully that you are able to interpret,
analyze and think logically about the material that you are studying.
Studying on the screen
is not as natural as you may think. There is only one way you can
master this...
...Practice
to read on the screen.
If you decide to take a CAT exam, you should be able to read pages and
pages of information continuously on the screen. If you cannot,
you are bound to find the test more difficult.
Don't do the same mistake
that most people are doing with their GRE preparation.
It
has been found from my market research team that the students who used
only books scored between 1550-1750 but students who used only CD's scored
above 1800. This is from a pool of 75 students from different cross
sections.
There is really no point in
not preparing with digital material when the exam is going to be digital.
This is in fact the single most important secret that every one is
missing in the GRE.
Students are finding that quantitative section has remained as it is and
verbal and analytical have gotten tougher. The simple reason for
this feeling is that there is a lot more of screen reading in verbal and
analytical than quantitative section.
In addition to practicing the GRE on the screen...
...Browse to get more screen
reading practice
You can do a lot of screen reading while browsing. But, most web
sites that students visit are mainly image based and hence require very
little reading.
So choose sites that need intense reading on useful topics.
http://library.thinkquest.org,
http://www.globalchange.com,
http://www.newscientist.com
are a few recommendations that I have.
Most digital reading that you do other than browsing is e-mail from friends
and again is not very useful for screen reading practice.
I recommend you to read a number of e-newsletters, e-journals or e-zines
that carry interesting articles. Many of them (though very few are
aimed at Indian users) have at least one full length article in each edition.
Reading those can give you good practice.
If you subscribe to at least 5 or 6 of them, you develop the habit of
reading information on screens.
Get a few from the
www.accepted.com
and
http://www.wordcommand.com/wordoftheday.htm. In addition to giving you training for reading on the screen, they cover
articles on various interesting topics.
In addition, you can spend some time identifying newsletters that carry
information of your interest. Subscribe to them as most of them
are free. To summarize use the following proven strategies
to tackle a tougher GRE
-
Realize
that the questions are not any tougher.
-
Realize
that the CAT feels tougher as it makes the exam tougher if you are
performing well. But this happens to everybody and ETS has taken
care of it.
-
Practice
to screen read using a digital GRE program
-
Practice
with real CATs
-
Browse
text intensive sites and subscribe and read many e-newsletters
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