The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GRE

PS: This article was written in 2022 when the examination pattern was quite different.

Introduction:

The Graduate Records Examination is an exam conducted by the Educational Testing Service often used by top foreign universities as a criterion when evaluating applications. Though there is a gradual shift away from using the GRE, a good GRE score (valid for five years after writing the exam) will boost your application. Most universities use the GRE score only as a cutoff, so there is no marginal utility in increasing one's score beyond the cutoff of one's target university (In our opinion, crossing 330 is enough; the only real benefit to scoring higher than that is a boost to one's ego).

The structure of the exam:

The GRE is divided into three parts:

• Verbal
• Quantitative
• Analytical

The verbal part consists of two sections of 20 objective questions each. These questions are designed to test the examinee's vocabulary and comprehension skills. The quantitative part is similarly divided into two sections of 20 objective math-based questions. The analytical part consists of two sections - the issue section and the argument section. The examinee is expected to write two essays - one analyzing the given issue and one analyzing the given argument. For the exam, the first two sections to appear are analytical, followed by alternating quantitative and verbal sections.

In addition, the GRE also has an unscored research section, which ETS uses to set questions for later iterations of the same exam. Of course, one won't be told which section is the research section, since that defeats the purpose of having a research section. ETS expects one to treat every section as if it counted towards one's score (So in addition to paying them 217 USD for the privilege of writing the exam, one also gets to act as an unpaid test subject). If one does badly on a section, one need not lose hope - one can convince oneself it was the research section and move on.

The maximum possible score in the GRE is 340; 170 in Quantitative, 170 in Verbal. The lowest possible score (obtained by showing up to the exam hall and doing nothing else) is 260. So the effective range of the score is 80; 40 for Quantitative and 40 for Verbal. I do not fully understand why ETS chose to shift the scale up by 260 (I speculate that it is to make scores look better than they actually are, at least to people who don't understand how the GRE system works).

The importance of GRE for applications:

Some universities are waiving off GRE (i.e. not considering GRE scores any more. But it’s always safe to write the exam).

Universities consideration of GRE:

• Required: When GRE is required, you obviously need to submit your scores in order to apply for the program.
• Recommended: When GRE is recommended, it is better to submit your scores as not doing that can lead to a potential rejection unless your profile is exceptional.
• Optional: In this case, you can choose to not submit your scores. If, however, your GPA is low or if you have already taken the GRE, it is better to submit the score as it will improve your profile.
• Not accepted: In this case, the university will not give any field in the application to fill in your GRE scores, and even sending the score to the university will be of no use as they won’t consider it.

Why I chose to write the GRE:

I came to know about this exam from a webinar on higher studies which I attended a year earlier. The instructor gave us particularly tricky questions from the GRE in an attempt to make us think the exam was difficult (and convince us to buy his company's test-prep products). After I failed to answer half the questions in the webinar, I felt that the GRE would be an interesting challenge. I asked my seniors (Sibibalan 'Sibi' Jeevanandam, Debeshee Das and Shreyansh Mehra, who I would like to thank for the guidance they provided) for information about the exam and guidance on how to prepare for it.

I decided to dedicate the summer before my third year to prepare for the GRE for the following reasons:

• I did not bother applying for any internships and had no plans for summer, and would definitely have wasted it if I did not have a clear goal to work towards.
• Since the scores were valid only for five years, there would be a hard deadline on when I need to start applying for a Masters programme; I did not want to get sucked into the rat-race and keep postponing plans for further studies.

Shortly after I began preparation, Aashrith Sai Madasu contacted me and told me that he was also preparing for the GRE, so we often discussed difficult questions and shared resources during the summer. We found that having other people who are preparing for the exam to talk to helped a lot.

Quantitative Sections:

The questions in this section are extremely easy; those who prepared for JEE Advanced will find this to be a cakewalk (provided their math skills haven't atrophed). I was pleasantly surprised by this fact, but also slightly worried since I am prone to making silly mistakes. I personally prefer a very hard paper which nobody completes over an easy paper where people easily get full. I remember constantly worrying that messing up a single question will cause me to lose a perfect score. As a consequence, I used to write several practice papers and spent hours poring over every mistake I made.

When I finally took a practice test, I was surprised to see that I had scored 170 despite making two errors. Intrigued, I did some research and came to know that one need not answer every question correctly to get a perfect score. The GRE has an interesting system of adaptive difficulty - those who do well in the first section are given harder papers in the second section and vice versa. The harder paper comes with a score bonus (and the easier paper comes with a score reduction). Knowing that this would offset any silly mistake I made, I turned my focus towards verbal.

The trickiest parts of this section are not tricky because of the math; rather, they are tricky because of the deceptive wording of questions. For instance, consider this:

Verbal Sections:

The objective questions are very easy provided one knows the meanings of all the options offered (and almost impossible if one does not), so improving vocabulary is quite important. Improving vocabulary does not consist merely of glancing at flashcards - one must use the new words they learn in everyday conversation. This is unfortunate, since the only people who will put up with one using arcane (oh look - another GRE word!) words in everyday speech are usually other GRE aspirants.

I personally found that learning the etymology of a word really helps me to remember its meaning. It is like the difference between mugging up a chemical reaction and understanding the mechanism behind it. English derives several words from Greek, Latin and German - so brushing up on basic Latin and Greek prefixes, roots and suffixes allows one to infer the meaning of a word one may never have seen before.

Consider the word 'antebellum'. Knowing that 'ante' is the latin prefix meaning 'before' and that 'bellum' is the latin root word for war, one can guess that 'antebellum' refers to the time before the war. Consider a phrase like "Bellum omnium contra omnes" - knowing that 'omnis' is the latin root word for 'all' and that 'contra' is the latin prefix for 'against', one can infer the phrase's meaning - "a war of all against all".

While I did not spend too much time brushing up on Greek and Latin, I feel that the time I did spend helped my vocabulary skills a lot. The benefit of doing this extends far beyond the GRE - anyone learning biology, philosophy or romance languages can attest to the importance of having a working knowledge of Greek and Latin vocabulary.

The skills required for comprehension-based questions are completely different. One must be able to read and understand passages quickly. The comprehensions could broadly be divided into a few types:

1. Science (usually my favorite - easy to understand and reason through)
2. History (pretty doable - history is the study of causes and effects, much like science)
3. Art (my least favorite - the prose tends to be unnecessarily flowery, the text dances around the core thesis instead of stating it clearly, there are many references to obscure artistic movements and all the options look very similar)

I found these questions the most difficult since they were usually very time-consuming and mentally exhausting. I would occasionally get lucky with a piece about something I was well-read on, only for the next piece to be about something whose existence I did not know about. Throughout preparation, my skills in this area showed only marginal improvement. Most of the mistakes I made in the verbal sections were usually in such questions.

It is generally recommended to read publications like Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal and The Economist for practice with comprehension. While I agree that this is a useful strategy for those who struggle with comprehension, I feel that this does not really help one pinpoint the correct option from a list of similar options.

My strategy was to look at each option individually and decide whether to eliminate it or not. If more than one option remained at the end, I would sort them based on relevance and pick the best (if I had too much time on my hands after the section was over, I would come back to the question argue with myself if whether the second best option is actually the right option; I would try my best to pick out flaws with the chosen answer until I either ran out of flaws to pick out or picked out enough flaws to justify switching the answer).

When doing verbal questions, one either gets the answer immediately (almost like a voice in one's head whispering the answer before one finishes reading the question) or spends a long time debating the relative merits of the presented options (almost like a second voice interrupting the first voice and proceeding to argue with it, while a third voice laughs in the background). The problem is that ETS designs some questions such that the first answer one thinks of is wrong. After encountering such questions, one learns that the first impulse must always be questioned (hence the joke among GRE aspirants - "if the answer you got is option A, redo the question").

In conclusion, this section is the most difficult for the average engineering student. I advise all GRE aspirants to put a lot of effort into preparing for this section.

Analytical Section:

Practicing for this section was an easy task, since 200 or so essay prompts have been published by ETS. What is more, it is almost certain that the prompt one gets on one's exam is picked from the pool of published prompts. My plan was to write two essays a day for two months (in the end, I had written only 10 essays in total). In addition, I wanted to brush up on my history since it is said that using historical examples to back up claims in an argument essay significantly strengthens the case one makes in one's essay ("brushing up on history", in my case, consisted almost entirely of looking at history memes).

Since the essay was to be typed on a barebones text editor (not even a copy-paste function, let alone spell-check), I began using Notepad++ (with no extensions and autocomplete turned off) to practice the essay. The worst part was getting used to light-mode; I had headaches the first few times I wrote essays. It is said that there is a soft limit on the essay score - wordcount÷100. So I made sure that all my essays crossed 600 words. I initially felt that my typing skills would need improvement since I am not a fast typer, but it turned out that the bottleneck when it came to writing essays was not typing speed but the speed of thinking what to type.

Aashrith and I often discussed particular essay prompts and analyzed each other's essays. In addition, the Career Development Forum (a discord server operated for and by IIT Tirupati students) was active when it came to discussing essays. After I submitted an essay where I used the failure of the provisional government of Russia before the Bolshevik revolution as an example, I was given some sound advice - stick to well-known historical examples and stay away from the obscure ones. I also made sure to stay away from using recent or ongoing events as examples, since their true historical significance is yet to be determined. ETS offers a service which lets one get two of one's essays graded in a manner similar to the grading system used in the exam (I did not use this service and so cannot comment on its usefulness).

During my preparation, I became convinced that leading the essay with a relevant quote from some famous intellectual would show the examiner that I was well-read in the various fields of the Humanities. To that end, I made up a list of people (divided by field) and spent time reading their best quotes.

• Literature: Dostoevsky, Orwell etc.
• Science: Sagan, Dawkins, Feynman etc.
• Philosophy: Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Nietschze, Arendt etc.
• Statecraft: Machiavelli, Kautilya, Bismarck, Sun-Tzu, Clausewitz etc.
• Economics: Keynes, Marx, Hayek etc.

(note how the economists are from different schools of thought - this way, I could find a relevant quote for an economic argument from any position)

However, all this work was for nothing since my mind went blank in the exam hall. So I began my essay with a quote from Optimus Prime, which was all I could recall at that moment. (the "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" quote, for anyone who is wondering)

Exam Day:

I booked a slot in the afternoon to go write the exam (I am not a morning person, and the drive was three hours). I arrived well before the reporting time and ate breakfast (while watching an episode of Transformers (1984)). I did not do any last minute-prep or revision, to keep my mind clear. It was quite easy to remain calm before the exam since I knew that if I did badly, I could try again whenever I wished (the only consequence for failure was 217 USD).

The exam center provided me with a pencil (they refused to give me a pen), a scratchpad and headphones (to block out the sound of all the keyboards in the exam hall). No water was allowed in the hall - I had to wait for a designated 10-minute break to drink water.

I was asked to sign an NDA before I started the exam, so I cannot reveal any concrete details about the contents of the exam. Though the exam was four hours long, it did not feel tiring. I had enough time during the break to eat some moong dal (I chose this for sentimental reasons - I had eaten the same thing during the break between paper 1 and paper 2 of Advanced) and drink water. As soon as the exam was over, my quantitative and verbal scores (unofficial) were displayed on the screen.

I was then asked to fill out which universities I wanted to send out my scores to. ETS allows the candidate to send out their scores to upto four universities for free, and charges money for further reporting of scores (I had not thought this far ahead, so I chose four universities whose names sounded vaguely prestigious).

After the exam, I spent the last two days of summer trying to reverse-engineer the official GRE calculator to make an exact copy (and design it to exactly mimic the dysfunctionality and unusability as the real thing - at the time of writing this article, work is still in progress). The final official result arrived 10 days or so after I wrote the exam.

Conclusion:

Overall, I feel that preparing for the GRE is better done over the long term with a couple of weeks of serious prep before the exam, rather than two whole months of dedicated preparation. I did not want to dedicate the whole summer to GRE, so I tried to cap the limit of time spent on prep at six hours per day (this did not matter - the most time I dedicated in a single day to prep was around 4 hours - the time taken to write a single practice test). Some people recommend taking 2 mock tests in a single day to build concentration and stamina which might be a critical factor for some of us.

Before I conclude, I will take a moment to reiterate that the GRE plays a very small part in the overall application of a candidate. So I would advise others to work on other things like

• CGPA
• Doing good projects or research work (if one is planning for PhD or thesis based master’s)
• Trying to get international internship opportunities (research (MITACS, DAAD WISE, etc.) or normal)
• Having a good SOP and good LORs (They don’t have to write glowing recommendations, you just have to interact with them or work with them so that they can claim to know you well enough to recommend you).

A holistic evaluation will be done of a student’s profile.

With all that said and done, if you are taking the GRE, I recommend you take it well before October 2022 if you are applying for Fall 2023, and similarly for future years. All the best for the exam, and Don’t Panic!

Special thanks to Aashrith Sai Madasu and Debeshee Das for contributing to this article.