Ag-gre-ieved…
Originally published November 2005
I must say that it took me by surprise. My score is by no means great. In conventional terms, average. It is also somehow, in those very conventional terms, beyond my expectations. As is usually the case with conventional terms; I should say both of these are quite inaccurate in their descriptions. I am of the firm opinion that the best I can say about the 1440/1600 that I put on the GRE, is that it was very amusing. But I’ll come to that in a bit.
Firstly, as Chomu put it, I beat the myth that you need upwards of 2 months of preparation to score more than 1400. Myth that it was, that is still understandable. Secondly, my sum total preparation was this: I looked through 13 wordlists, in a not-so-famous compendium that I shall not name. And I do mean looked through. At about 5 minutes each, that is a good 65 minutes. I did about 5 practice tests. That’s about 6 hours. Would have been less, but I actually sat and typed out and checked practice essays. That’s it. I am pretty serious, when I say that I did not prepare.
At this point I must say, that there are two ways that someone could get a score like that without a lot of hard work. One, is luck of course. I am sure this was not the case, as my test was by no means easy. I actually took 29 minutes to solve a section that was designed for 30. Second, an incredible vocabulary. I am sorry to say, that I don’t have this either. I am infact quite verbally impaired, although my language is quite refined, in some ways. I usually know a word by sense. But more about that some other time. The point is that I actually did not know the meanings of many of the words on the test.
So how in the world did this happen?! I think I have an answer to that. And I believe I had the answer, before I gave the test. And no that is not something I say in retrospect. The fact is, the GRE, like many other standardized testing procedures, is just that. A procedure. When you want to test things like “relationships between words” or “words that mean the opposite of each other”, getting questions together has to be an ordeal. Of course, if it were merely a test of such things, it would be quite useless. But then, you add a tinge of subtelty, which ends up being a lot of ambiguity. You also want to add a touch of obscurity, so that you can make it necessary for people to buy books, or get trained for tests like these. The (well-known) truth is, the majority of the words that one needs to get to know, for the GRE, are hardly necessary for the common English speaking man’s existence. Well, the point is — and this is the clincher — a verbal test is hardly about vocabulary. It’s more about grammar, parts of speech and the like. And being an objective test, it is also quite a bit about logic.
Now how does that work!? Well firstly, it is (much) easier to identify wether a word is a noun, verb, adjective than it is to either recall a word from memory, or to place a known word into a clear definition. Now surprisingly, that is atleast a third of the work done. The next part is to try and relate parts of the options to parts of the question. So if A:B::C:D, quite clearly, A:C::B:D. Not always, but fairly often; and yes this works quite well in the sentence completion scenario as well; where the definite answer, is only an extension of what the sentence itself is saying. Very often the only other thing that you have to look for is to match the affirmative/negative sense of the various parts of the sentence with that of the options. Now the third and final part, before we arrive at the answer is to put the words in a sentence of your own, and in the case of multiple words, try and put them as close to each other as possible. It is incredible how this works, even with words that you know nothing about. Voila! You have your answer; or in the least fewer choices to pick the answer out from.
I do not claim that this is the most elegant or efficient or effective method. But it works, and most of the time. And of course, if you want to ace the test, you are going to need the exceptions, and that would take a week of preparation, at the most, and some appropriate guidance (in the form of a book, that can see the point of this post), about those exceptions maybe.
And coming to why I found the whole experience amusing. Two things actually. Firstly — the confirmation sequence, pesky as it was, reminded me of a certain Bush-Kerry-Florida-Voting_Machine-Video piece. Secondly — I actually did a lot better in the extra “research” section than in any part of the actual test; thanks atleast in part to the slender chance of getting my money back! I walked out with quite a sizable grin.
I remember Golu and Panda had a lot to say when I said things like, “How the hell can people learn up words!” and “I am not going to do this.”. Not that I feel vindicated. Just that I feel pretty confident that I can do things my way, and get away with it.