Gave my attempt today, totally thrown off
Hey folks! Had a terrible day today with the GRE exam. These opinions below are, of course, subjective and based on my prep using Gregmat so far. I like his style of teaching and love his course.
Based on my attempt today, I would definitely say his medium questions are indeed medium on GRE too, and not tougher than those of GRE, as claimed by people on this sub. For me, the first section bent towards 4/5 difficulty in a stark contrast to PP2.
I scored as much as I did on my diagnostic today, after 2.5 months of prep. I am too demotivated and pretty much thrown off, as I did not expect this. I am not sure if I was just unlucky or if the GRE has gotten enormously difficult. Of course, exam anxiety plays a role, and I was nervous.
I had seen improvement in my score using Gregmat from my diagnostic two months back (144 V and 152Q) to last month's attempt of PP2 (152V and 159Q). However, in my official GRE attempt today, I felt the first sections of Verbal and Quant were considerably tougher than PP2 or equivalent to at least Greg's mock difficulties.
Sharing my experience below:
In the first verbal section, the first few TC questions threw me off so badly. They were wordy with fancy vocabulary and jargon, and I couldn't comprehend a single sentence. I could tell these are of 4/5 difficulty easily. I didn't falter, but next up, RC made sure today wasn't my day. I felt it was at least 5 in difficulty. Only the SE questions felt at a 2/3 medium level, and Greg's vocab came in handy.
The quant went even worse with the 2nd or 3rd question being a big, heavy probability and P&C mix question, and even after spending 2 minutes on it, I couldn't understand jack sh*t. I moved on only to find tougher questions with (again) probability and a set topic mix-up in Data Analysis. I did not see any coordinate geometry, compound interest, ratios, remainders, volume/area questions in this section. These came up in my easier second section.
I felt the universe was having breakfast with the devil and relished looking at me struggling 😄
I knew by that time that I had bombed the GRE. I got easy second sections for V and Q. I completed both of these before time (verbal 4 minutes remaining lol and quant 3 minutes) and walked out with almost a crying face :3
To be honest, when I went for the test, I expected my score to be more than that of my PP2 attempt OR AT LEAST AT PAR WITH IT, considering I took it almost a month ago with less prep. I will, of course, now start from scratch and see where I am going wrong (I know it is more to do with strategies and trickery than the concepts).
Overall, hate it 😞