GRE and my lessons - Timing skill

It’s a week since my GRE test. But I still have a clear image about the test. That was a challenge in my life. I tried to get the highest result as I can. However, the score was not as good as I expected. It made me down, harmed my confidence badly. I need to do something to raise me up. One of them was having a look into my mistakes and weaknesses. This post is for that purpose. There is another reason for me to write is that I had learn some valuable lessons when cramming the GRE and it can help me further my learning and also can apply in my life.
The biggest lesson that I learnt is that I need a better time management skill. ETS says that this is the key for getting good score in GRE. To me, this skill is important for both cramming and test taking.


Time management
Most of the time spent for preparing for GRE is used for learning vocabulary, and most of the student will soonly recognize that learning GRE vocabulary is such a boring job. It’s tedious not just because it seem overwhelming to learn Barron’s 3500 words lists, but also due to the low effect of remembering words. Many time, you have to learn the whole word list just as a brand new one, although the fact is that you did spent a lot of time learning it last week. Many GRE test-taker share with each other a special timetable which is implemented spaced rehearsal technique. This is a good new for me to learn vocabulary in least time while still remember the almost the words. How to make this timetable? You can get the idea by reading this(vietphd.org) and this(smart.fm). It’s better to have your own version of timetable which is suitable for your time and how many words you can learn each day.

I also found that having plan is very helpful to keep track of where I’m in a long road of achieving sth. As I said, learning GRE vocabulary is tedious job. Although I always try to make it fun and amusing, and also the fact that I learn different wordlists everyday, it doesn't help me stop asking myself why I keep doing this borring job. Without a timetable it’s very hard for me to know where I am in the road? - because everyday I do the same things again and again, what should I do next? - there always had the temptation to stop or be distracted by other more interesting thing. Actually, this problem also happen in my life. Many time, I feel exhausted with working and doing other things, and lose my ability to be aware of what is my goal and decide what I should do next, then I just keep wasting my time at the end of day until time for sleeping. This is so bad and even worse while I know that having clear plans for what I will do in next year, quarter, month, week are very useful, but I always have excuses to refuse to do that. This time, I will try to accomplish this must-do task.

Timing skill in testing
Timing skill in taking GRE test is even more important. In GRE test, with in 30 minutes, your job is answering 30 verbal questions which are classified in 4 types. Each type of question needs different amount of time for being answered. Thus, you need to distribute your time in each question wisely to get a good score. GRE CAT rule, which basically says that the first 10 questions are weighted more than the latter, thus, are more important to your score, makes this skill even more difficult. That means, in first 10-15 questions, althought you meet easy questions, you have to slow yourself down to make sure that all your answers for these questions are correct! I was very aware of this and did well, but got problems on the second part of the test, when I had to rush answering other questions. This is because the second part is where I got a lot of reading question, my biggest weakness.

Do thing fast
To be honest, before GRE, I read English text with an extremely slow speed. It used to take me about 10 minutes to read a GRE long paragraph with 60-80 lines. When cramming, I try to use as many techniques as I can learn to push myself read faster while still get the structure of the passage, such as noticing to connection words (but, then…), finding the keywords, trying to anticipate the author purpose…, and most important, being very very concentrated. In general, my reading speed is improved, however, I got into a traditional dilemma: the faster I read, the less I understand the passage. In about 2,5 – 3 minutes, sometime I can get topic, structure and purpose of the 60-line-passage, where some specific details is mentioned, while, many time I can not. This skill, I know, needs time and a lot of practice to be improved. Badly, I don’t have much time for practicing before the test. It killed my GRE scrore ;( I was also slow in Sentence Completion part, while many other guys in TestMagic can do each question in 20-30 seconds, I finished it only after 50-70 seconds.
Being slowly is my weakness, it’s important for me to recognize that. Therefore, in the next few months, instead of spending time to gain new skills, I will mainly focus on learning and doing thing faster.

These timing skills seem obvious in life. Badly, I keep refusing to realize it value and didn't focus to build them until I suffered by my weakness. A valuable lesson that I don't want to be taught twice.