[备考心经] 国外网上的新G考后感

I’ve just staggered out of the new, 4-hour GRE, and this email is your update on the revised test.
Everyone (and I mean everyone) was worried about this new test – ETS kept telling us it would be better, but ETS has been known to blow smoke in the past. My verdict:  It’s better in some ways, about the same in others, and I’d say (for the most part) less awesome in ways that aren’t the end of the world.

The bad:

• It’s really long.  Two 30-minute essays plus two 35-minute math sections plus two 30-minute verbal sections PLUS an experimental section (30 or 35 minutes). LONG!  Almost 4 hours.
• Remember how before you might not ever have to deal with the super-hard questions?  Super-hard is now in the mix for all test takers (more on this later).
• The math section now contains parabolas, more advanced standard deviation stuff, and a few weird expansions of some of our less-used concepts (like compound interest and permutations).  The very hard math questions are the hardest I’ve ever seen on a GRE and harder than the really hard GMAT questions.
• They’ve extended the re-take period: you have to wait 60 days to take the new GRE a second time.

The neutral:

• There’s still vocab on the test.  The vocab is still hard.  But it’s more of a sentence completion type of hard than an analogies or antonyms hard.
• The new verbal question types should feel very familiar – they’re basically an expansion of sentence completion and reading comp (okay, so that last bit may fall under “bad” for some of you).
• Most of the math content is the same.
• The essays are exactly the same.
• There are new question types for both math and verbal, but I don’t think they’re harder question types, just different.

The good:

• Analogies and antonyms are gone!!!!
• There’s a smattering of a verbal question type that our GMAT students generally like, called Arguments (they’re called that on the GMAT, here they’re just called Reading Comp).  They’re kind of fun.
• This is huge: they give you an on-screen calculator.  It’s basic, but it’s nice to have.
• You can skip and go back to questions within a section.
• I think, on balance, that the verbal is somewhat more manageable and the math is equally good/bad.  You can skip the monster math questions, which makes them less awful than if you couldn’t, and instead make up points on easier questions (see below re scoring).
• The scoring works totally differently.  It’s an interesting mix of the old paper-and-pencil scoring and computer adaptive.  What that means is that each section is a non-adaptive mish-mash of questions, with level of difficulty all mixed up within the section.  Every question is worth the same as every other question.  So!  You can choose to skip the awful hard ones and focus instead on the more manageable questions.  This is really nice because….
•  We have GREAT techniques for this test, already ready to go.  They’re a combo of the techniques you’ve seen (plugging in, for instance), and new ones that are really old ones from back when the GRE was a paper and pencil test.

And finally:  The test WILL give you an unofficial score!  Now, don’t get too excited – it’s given as a range of 50 points (so it might say that you’ve scored between a 550 and a 600).  But that’s still really nice – it lets you know whether you’re likely to need to take it again.  Remember that any test you take between now and early November won’t be reported to schools until mid-November at the earliest.  Anderson has announced that they’re willing to wait as long as the rest of your application is in on time.  Check with other schools to see how they plan to handle this.
That’s it for now!  Feel free to email me with any questions!