Dear All,

I think GRE is not very useful if your undergraduate degree is from a noted school(say Harvard) and you have a high GPA(say, 4.0). However, if you are a graduate of a relatively less well known school (say, Pulchouk), then sometimes it helps when you are applying to a good graduate program, irrespective of which program you are applying to.

Some of my friends benefitted from the tips I had given to them, so let me share my own experience with you guys. I graduated from a sarakari highschool in Chitwan, and did my undergraduate in Chinese medium school, so my experience is even more useful to some of you who may have been daunted by the prospect of taking the intensive course. As every other exam, you should take this exam as a challenge, and prepare accordingly, but without letting it monopolize your time. You need good GPA to get into a good graduate school, period, so the preference is lexicographic, and you shouldn't compromise your regular study to get a better score in GRE.

It is important to know how to use the words, and for that purpose, you should use it frequently. Now, where would you use it? Using the word such as 'tergiversation' in your day to day conversation might scare your friends away from you. I used to have a friend in Bangladesh, who was relatively weak in English, and we agreed that we would communicate in English. He used to read my long mails, and write careful reactions. If you have such patients friends, it will be really helpful.

Furthermore, I was a voracious reader, who read Newsweek, Time, and a lot of classic English literature.I liked Salmand Rushdie's Midnight Children, not only because of the plot, but also because it allowed me to encounter so many words that I had just memorized.  

Knowing words alone is just a first step. You need to have a retentive memory to read and understand passages quickly. This probably depends on your own evolution as a reader and student over time. The benefit of knowing all the words, to me, was that I could go over antonym and analogy section quickly, and save time for passage. In the exam, I had finished the verbal section in below twenty minutes, and scored maximum possible[800], and I had wrongly answered only one question[you can check your result later].

Finally, relax while taking the test. If you panick, just leave the test room, and retake it later. There is no point in scoring less than what you actually can.Just before taking the real test, I took three simulated tests, downloaded from ETS website,and they were quite good approximation of my future score and the test I was about to take.

GRE scores are just that, it is good to forget them once the exam is over and you get into grad school[Just like SLC scores]. However, in some finance companies, when hiring students for investment banking or quantitative analyst job, they often sort applicants, which sometimes tend to be thousands,  based on standardized tests such as SAT and GRE, so you might as well mention your score in your resume. This is only marginally helpful, but margin decides so many things in our life, anyway. 

If you need some help, feel free to send me an email at bpoudel@berkeley.edu! I may not be able to reply emails all the time, but I am a very helpful person:). I used to visit Sajha frequently, but don't do that anymore,though I have visited lately to write about Tibetan protesters, so I apologize in advance if I don't reply on time to any more questions you may post in this forum.