Of all the different questions that students work on as they prep for the GRE Verbal, none seem to routinely cause as much trepidation as the Text Completion. If you’ve taught the GRE as much as I have, then you know the particular sigh of fear and pre-emptive defeat that students give when they turn to page to see a sentence riddled with long underscores.
Vocabulary is one of the biggest and most important aspects of the GRE. You will need to start studying vocabulary well before you take the test, because it is a slow process. There is a limit to how many words you can effectively study at one time; it is impossible to learn thousands of words by cramming at the last minute.
There are no real shortcuts, either. Some people try to learn root words in an attempt to minimize study time, but this technique does not work very well on the GRE, for various reasons:
I often hear people wonder whether it is possible to increase one’s GRE score. They believe that a standardized test score is more or less set in stone, one’s score changing plus or minus two points depending on the day. This line of thinking is actually woefully inaccurate; with a combination of diligence, resources, and the proper approach, you can greatly increase your score. Indeed, I’ve seen a couple of Magoosh students increase their scores by 29 points.
With so many GRE test prep options available, it can be hard to know where to start looking. Hopefully this outline of the types of options available will help you get an idea of what would work best for you.
There are two different ways to think about the concept of doing your GRE test prep online: 1) working with an online GRE tutor and 2) enrolling in an online GRE prep course. In this article, we’ll focus on the idea of working with an online tutor.
The verbal section of the GRE consists of three types of questions: reading comprehension, text completion, and sentence equivalence. Since the ability to analyze texts critically is of fundamental importance in research, a good score on the verbal section of the GRE is very reassuring to graduate admission committees.