I Committed!

Two weeks ago I sucked it up and plunked down $140 to take the GRE at the end of the month. It is seriously crunch time!

My friend told me once you commit to a date, you’ll want to study more. It’s true- I’m reviewing vocab words and typing this post as we speak.

Some things to note:

1. See if you’re eligible for a fee reduction voucher. I didn’t think about this until after I paid for the exam. But since I’m sort of on a deadline to get apps submitted by the end of the year, there wasn’t any time. If you know you’re not planning to take the test for a couple months, do your research. If you can save yourself $70, all the more power to you!

2. GREGuide.com- I’m using their site for vocab word review (NB: they need an editor. If bad grammar makes you sic(!), then be prepared for lots of spelling errors on their site). All I do is review vocab words, look up the words I don’t know, and review, review, review.

Some other things I’ve been doing:

I’ve now graduated from doing exercises from books to actually doing them on a computer to get the feel of how the test will be like. I’m now trying to do timed exercises as well: attack each question, then move on. I’m trying to not get boggled by a question.

I sat down over the weekend and did a practice test. Let me tell you, I had such a headache afterwards. I couldn’t even study the next day- my brain refused to work. All I did that day was make cupcakes. And most of them were overcooked because I couldn’t remember to take them out of the oven in time.

The computer adaptive test really is a draining exam–back when they had the paper exam, easy, medium, and hard questions were all mixed in. But since the test measures you constantly at your competitive level, it forces you to be constantly on your game. If you get tired, and pick the wrong answer, you go down. So I’m planning on getting some sleep, eat a nice meal a couple of hours before, and attack this test like no other!

Something I also do when working on the exercises is that I cover the answers that’s shown on the screen and try to form my own. By comparing my own version to the 5 options, it helps to weed out those tricky ones. this is particularly helpful with the antonyms, analogies, and sentence completions.

What I recently stopped doing was numbering all my scratch paper with the A, B, C, D, E. I know several of the guide books tell you to do this, but honestly, it took up a lot of my time. Once I progressed, I could figure out the answer faster than it would take to number my scratch paper. So while I still number down from time to time, I don’t do the whole 1-30. Talk about hand cramp!

As for math, see for yourself:

I think I’m okay. I brainstorm on a few writing prompts (both issue and argument) every once in awhile and actually did a practice one today with the GRE Powerprep program ETS sends you.

I can’t wait until this is over.