【考生身份】全職考生
【學校及科系】NYU Computer Science
【英文背景】從小中英同時讀
【考試地點】一戰 Test at home
【考試成績】一戰 V163 Q167 AW4.5，總分 330 分
【考試日期】一戰 2020/09/30
【字彙】
I watched 李碩老師’s lessons in video format. I found the grouping of vocabularies into categories really useful and made memorizing vocabs a fair bit easier. Remembering certain Latin roots also helped. For test takers who are already familiar with the language, I would recommend memorizing at least 1000 words. I paired the in-class material with Magoosh on my phone. Make sure to revisit previously memorized vocabs and constantly brush up on them (you would be amazed by how fast you forget them).
【填空】
In my opinion, fill-in-the-blank questions tend to test you on two things: sentence structure/logic and vocab. 李碩老師 provides a few common sentence structures, which are certainly worth studying if you have the time, but memorizing all of them is most likely a lost cause. For non-English speakers the most efficient way to improve your Verbal score is likely to memorize vocab (as it is usually a precondition to getting the question correct anyways). Make sure to do a lot of practice questions as it is a great way to develop intuition for fill-in-the-blank questions.
【閱讀】
If you are a slow reader like me, 艾老師’s techniques on how to extract key information from a passage can be really useful. I would follow 艾老師’s advice on perfecting short-passage questions and only working on long-passage questions if you have the time. I would also go through all the 真經 questions for practice as a lot of them seem to fall under a pattern, and after familiarizing with them you can almost guess what’s going to be asked before you even look at the questions.
【計量】
The lessons were a good recap on high school math. For the Quants section, the best way to study is probably to spam practice questions. It’s important to be precise in reading the questions (as some of them are purposefully tricky) and work through them swiftly. Again, in my experience, the Test-At-Home format puts you at a disadvantage for this section.
【寫作】
For the writing section, I would recommend following one of 艾老師’s templates for a guaranteed bottom line. The importance of practicing writing questions cannot be understated. I was able to recycle multiple arguments from my previous writings and basically went into the test on autopilot. I would recommend doing a bare minimum of 5 practice questions (preferably on different topics). It would also be useful to prepare arguments for each of the themes ahead of time.
【讀書計畫】
During my 2 months of study, I also had to work as an intern on weekdays so I didn’t have a lot of hours to study. Magoosh was definitely a lifesaver just for its convenience. Other than that, I spent the majority of my time going through practice questions. I strongly recommend sticking to a strict vocab-memorizing schedule. For me, I studied 50 new vocabs every 2 days and revisiting all previous vocabs every 4 days.
【準備心得】
I had around 2 months to prep for the GRE, the first of which was spent on going through all the lessons in video format and the latter month going through practice questions, memorizing vocabs throughout. I found a direct correlation between the number of vocabs I memorized and my verbal reasoning score. If there is one takeaway from this entire post, it’s to memorize as many vocabs as you can. Regarding the Test-At-Home format, I don’t recommend it (if it ever becomes an option again). I missed out on around 15min of time for my second Quant section because I apparently lost connection to the proctor. Also, you are only allowed to use a marker on a single sheet of plastic-sleeved A4 for calculations, which not only makes writing an inconvenience, but also limits your ability to go back to previous questions to check your work (since you’ll need to erase them right away to make space for the next question).