Tips to GRE® Verbal Practice for Good GRE® Score
Introduction to GRE® Verbal
Worried about your difficult GRE® Verbal questions dragging your scores down? You're definitely not alone! The good news is, you need not struggle with memorizing long words and tough reading comprehension passages any longer! Want to know more about how we at AdmitEDGE have helped over 1500+ students achieve a 320 and above on their GRE? We believe the secret to our success lies in personalized training along with real-time feedback & comprehensive performance tracking.
Tend to forget words no sooner than you read them? Struggle with reading long and complicated passages? Multiple choice multiple answer questions got you all worked up? Tackling the GRE® Verbal section requires highly effective preparation and one-on-one concept clearing sessions! Preparing for your GRE® from practice tests alone or by memorizing thousands of GRE® words is unlikely to yield dividends in an exam that's notorious for its trick questions and adaptive difficulty levels. What we recommend, is a much simpler strategy comprising the 3 tenets of Learn, Practice, and Feedback, delivered to you at the comfort of your home, in small, bite-sized servings. Preparing for your target GRE® score has never been easier.
“Practice makes perfect,” says an old adage.
That applies well to the Verbal section of the GRE®, which is normally considered to be relatively difficult in the GRE®.
We would not recommend a blind plunge into online GRE® practice tests without first knowing what skills and fundamentals they entail. Without this, it is as fool-hardy as entering a war-zone without any strategy. Many feel that taking a large number of GRE® Verbal Practice tests is all that it needs, while some believe GRE® Verbal is only about mastering thousands of words. While these are elements of GRE® Verbal Practice, they are not the complete thing.
Skills to Score high in GRE® Verbal Test
Let’s first understand the skills needed to score high in the Verbal section.
The two most fundamental skills for topping the Verbal section are Vocabulary and Reading Skills. Following them are the Verbal Reasoning Skills that are needed to:
Locate clues
Locate clues in an incomplete sentence by reading thoroughly and making notes if needed
Draw Inferences
Draw the right inferences from what is not explicitly talked about by the author in a passage.
GRE® Verbal Reasoning practice or GRE® verbal practice test should, in summary, involve the development of all these skills in a smart and efficient manner.
The first step towards improving your Verbal Reasoning skills is to master at least 400-500 GRE® words. This will help you understand the context of usage and distinguish between similar answer choices clearly, which is essential for answering Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion accurately.
So, you must understand the meaning, the synonyms, the context of usage as well as degree of intensity.
In general, once you complete your preparation you must be thorough with 3000+ GRE® words so that you have a strong hold on Verbal. This means that you will have to learn Vocabulary in parallel with other aspects of your GRE® Preparation.
It is good to be thorough with 3000+ words. Apart from the definitions of words, one needs to know the contexts in which the words are used, the nuances of the words, and their synonyms. A mastery of this kind helps you in answering the Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence question types of GRE® Verbal.
WordBot from AdmitEDGE is a thoughtfully designed app to help develop the right skills in GRE® Vocabulary
Wordbot is a smart word learning app from AdmitEDGE that helps you develop sharp vocabulary. The practice, revisions, and bookmarks make word learning a pleasure, to make preparing for your GRE® an easy and fun task!
Research has shown that the human brain processes images a whopping 60,000x faster than it processes text. With WordBot get highly relevant images to accompany each GRE® word to ensure you learn faster than ever!
Monitor your progress real-time with data that tracks and records your performance every step of the way. Know which words you have seen, learnt and memorized & devote your valuable time to highly directed and effective practice.
The unlimited GRE® vocabulary tests give you ample practice in learning the nuances of the words and their synonyms, besides providing a systematic way to keep track of the words you mastered, as well as features to help you retain the words in memory—such as relevant images and audio. Besides, the words are grouped by themes and Greek/Latin roots to help you divide and conquer the large base of words.
Learn 3500 GRE® words with fun from today
Try WordbotDeveloping a Strong Vocabulary
You should begin GRE® Verbal Reasoning practice with a base vocabulary of 400–500 words, and ensure that you continue developing your Vocabulary in parallel.
To develop strong reasoning skills for Text Completion (TC) and Sentence Equivalence (SE), ensure that you practice a good number of questions that give you exposure to a variety of sentence styles and situations. Clues to such questions lie in the sentence structure and the context presented by the incomplete sentences. A diverse set of questions arranged in the increasing order of difficulty can provide you ample exposure and practice to sentence styles.
The TC Practice module and the SE Practice module in AdmitEDGE Learning Tracker are thoughtfully designed keeping this objective in mind. They contain a number of GRE® Online Practice tests for these question types.
Further, sound explanations to the questions in the tests, and clarification of your doubts by an expert will help refine your Verbal Reasoning skills. The Student Facilitator and Analyst (SFA) at AdmitEDGE plays a key role here in clarifying your doubts as well as providing you personalized feedback after each practice test to help you develop your reasoning skills.
You should begin GRE® Verbal Reasoning practice with a base vocabulary of 400–500 words, and ensure that you continue developing your Vocabulary in parallel.
To develop strong reasoning skills for Text Completion (TC) and Sentence Equivalence (SE), ensure that you practice a good number of questions that give you exposure to a variety of sentence styles and situations. Clues to such questions lie in the sentence structure and the context presented by the incomplete sentences. A diverse set of questions arranged in the increasing order of difficulty can provide you ample exposure and practice to sentence styles.
The TC Practice module and the SE Practice module in AdmitEDGE Learning Tracker are thoughtfully designed keeping this objective in mind. They contain a number of GRE® Online Practice tests for these question types.
Further, sound explanations to the questions in the tests, and clarification of your doubts by an expert will help refine your Verbal Reasoning skills. The Student Facilitator and Analyst (SFA) at AdmitEDGE plays a key role here in clarifying your doubts as well as providing you personalized feedback after each practice test to help you develop your reasoning skills.
Start your preparation with AdmitEDGE & get ready for a High GRE® Verbal score today
Start NowAddressing the biggest challenge of Verbal - RC
Reading Comprehension forms 50% of GRE® Verbal. The passages are usually of scholarly nature and on diverse topics such as sociology, history, literature, science, economics etc
You need to develop strong Analytical Reading Skills for this purpose.
These skills help you identify:
The important statements of the passage that should be read in detail.
The support ideas that can be browsed through quickly. This improves the efficiency of your reading.
The Analytical Reading Practice Module in AdmitEDGE Learning Tracker helps you to practice and develop strong skills in reading articles and passages of the types that appear in GRE® Verbal.
Having mastered skills in Analytical Reading, the next step is to develop Verbal Reasoning to answer RC questions with high accuracy.
The reasoning here includes the ability to:
Accurately understand the reasoning, purpose, and main idea of the passage
Correctly infer what is implicitly communicated by the author in the passage.
Identify the well-designed distracters among the choices so as not to fall prey to them.
The Analytical Reading Practice Module in AdmitEDGE Learning Tracker helps you to practice and develop strong skills in reading articles and passages of the types that appear in GRE® Verbal.
Again, ample practice in different RC passages covering a variety of topics, question types, and difficulty levels help you develop GRE® Verbal Reasoning skills for RC. The RC practice modules in AdmitEDGE Learning Tracker are designed carefully by keeping this in mind. They contain a good number of GRE® online practice tests for exposure to diverse question types in RC.
Further, the GRE® Verbal Reasoning practice tests help you to benchmark yourself with respect to your target GRE® score and determine if your progress is adequate with respect to your target. The Student Facilitator and Analyst (SFA) at AdmitEDGE Online Academy helps you identify and fill your weak areas.
Once the above skills are in place, you need to practice developing time management skills. For this, practicing with online GRE® Style Tests or online Mock GRE® Tests with only the Verbal Section is ideal. Finally, you move on to practice Full Length online GRE® style tests that are adaptive like the real GRE® and include all three sections—AWA, Verbal, and Quantitative Reasoning.
In summary, your GRE® Verbal Practice for Reasoning should follow these steps:
Developing Vocabulary and Reading Skills.
Developing Verbal Reasoning skills for the three Question types—TC, SE, and RC.
Mastering Time-management.
"The SFA's were very helpful. Verbal SFA Shweta tracked my performance closely giving me constructive feedback and that helped a lot. It turned out to be a perfect mix for me wherein I was getting both critical and motivational remarks."
- Manish (GRE® Verbal Score - 162)
- Manish (GRE® Verbal Score - 162)
Importance of enough GRE® Math practice tests
At this juncture, it is also important to point out that while targeted practice is essential for improvement, beware of neglecting the other significant half that makes up the GRE® - GRE® Math.
Most students who have trained in the Indian Educational System do not realize the enormous advantage they enjoy with respect to GRE® Math. This is because the Math section in GRE® only tests high school concepts of arithmetic, algebra, geometry and data interpretation.
In this regard, sufficient but relevant GRE® Mathematics practice tests can get many students past the 160 mark and help them reach their target scores.
After years of training students, we have narrowed down the major problem areas that must be tackled during GRE® Math Practice:
Conceptual Mistakes
This requires focused study materials that expose the student to questions that test a particular concept in entirely different ways. Being thorough on the concepts is very important here. To put it simply, to overcome conceptual errors, you must take a lot of Math practice tests with different types of questions from all sections at various difficulty levels. At AdmitEDGE, our Essential Module and Advanced Module aim to provide the holistic GRE® Math Practice tests & Preparation you need to improve your conceptual understanding.
Calculation Mistakes
These are easily avoidable and occur due to minor oversights such as lack of attention to detail etc. Commonly referred to as silly mistakes, you can rectify them putting yourself in a test-like environment as often as possible during GRE® Math Practice. This means that you must take as many fully adaptive, timed GRE® Style Math practice tests and Verbal Practice tests as possible to train your mind to think under the pressure of time, difficult questions etc.This ensures that you improve your speed, accuracy and reduces the occurrence of silly mistakes.
Conceptual Mistakes
This requires focused study materials that expose the student to questions that test a particular concept in entirely different ways. Being thorough on the concepts is very important here. To put it simply, to overcome conceptual errors, you must take a lot of Math practice tests with different types of questions from all sections at various difficulty levels. At AdmitEDGE, our Essential Module and Advanced Module aim to provide the holistic GRE® Math Practice tests & Preparation you need to improve your conceptual understanding.
Calculation Mistakes
These are easily avoidable and occur due to minor oversights such as lack of attention to detail etc. Commonly referred to as silly mistakes, you can rectify them putting yourself in a test-like environment as often as possible during GRE® Math Practice. This means that you must take as many fully adaptive, timed GRE® Style Math practice tests and Verbal Practice tests as possible to train your mind to think under the pressure of time, difficult questions etc.This ensures that you improve your speed, accuracy and reduces the occurrence of silly mistakes.
