GRE score remains valid for 5 years. However, it is recommended not to keep score older for more than 2 years.

Scores older than 2 years is considered with less importance by Universities. Hence, it is  best  to plan to take the test one  year before you plan to go for your Masters. It gives you sufficient time for application processes at various universities as well.

Do you realize you have only half-a-minute to answer one question in GRE? You will come across with  questions on antonyms and synonyms in the verbal section. Can you then keep guessing? What do you to help you manage your time effectively on the D-Day?

Well here are few pointers –

1)        Start preparing for your GRE well in advance.

2)        Familiarize yourself with most of the roots, prefixes and suffixes

3)        Do not mug up. Instead spend some time with the word.

4)        Dissect a word to understand the word root, prefix and suffix

5)        Relate the word you ‘kind of know’ or ‘don’t know’ to words having similar roots, sounds, prefixes, suffixes etc

The fee to take the GRE test is $150 within the United States, some U.S. Territories, and Puerto Rico. The fee is $170 in all other locations (except China, including Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan, where it is $175).

You can register for the GRE online at www.gre.org.

Hi there! Today we are going to spend some light on GRE Antonyms – seemingly one of the most puzzling and baffling section on the GRE. The good news is that for those who are planning to appear for their GRE on or after August 1, 2011, there would be NO Antonym section in the revised GRE (Antonyms and analogies have been removed from the test, so there are no more questions that test vocabulary out of context), but for those who are testing before Aug 2011, Antonym is still a reality.

Truly speaking, GRE Antonyms section is not that hard as you imagine it to be. Once in possession with some effective learning tools and strategies you will see yourself cracking this section effortlessly. An Antonym is the ‘opposite’ of the given word. In the GRE exam you are expected to read the word aloud in your mind and once you comprehend its meaning, look for a word from the five given answer options that is ‘nearly’ the opposite of the given word. For example if the given word is ‘Deny’, the option that is ‘nearly’ the opposite of the word will be ‘Acknowledge’. Hope this makes clear the above mentioned point.

According to the ETS, here are some approaches that may be helpful in answering antonym questions

• Remember that you are looking for the word that is the most nearly opposite to the given word; you are not looking for a synonym (meaning). Many words do not have a precise opposite, so you must look for the answer choice that expresses a concept most nearly opposite to that of the given word.
• In some cases, more than one of the answer choices may appear at first to be opposite to the given word. When this happens, try to define more precisely or in greater detail the meaning of the given word.
• In weighing answer choices, it is often useful to make up a sentence using the given word or words. Substitute the answer choices in the phrase or sentence and see which best fits. The best answer will be the one that reverses the meaning or tone of the sentence or phrase.
• Remember that a particular word may have more than one meaning.
• Use your knowledge of root, prefix, and suffix meanings to help you determine the meanings of unfamiliar words.

Make Use of Some Cool Antonyms Practice Tests here on Skill-Guru.

Bishop of the UCF said the GRE changes will force students preparing to graduate to rely less on memorization and more on reading, reasoning and analyzing. According to the College of Graduate Studies for the 2010 school year, there were more than 12,000 applicants to UCF’s graduate school. Of these applicants, more than 7,500 were accepted. The current scores are based on a 300 to 800 scale while the new scores are 100 to 200.

The revised test will have new questions, a different format, a new scoring system and should better reveal a student’s likely success in graduate school, according to the website of the Educational Test Service, the administrator of the GRE. You can find the article on Central Future Florida.com

GRE is new and revised. For those who are still new with its system, GRE is one of the eligibility tests taken by the students to seek admission into their favorite graduate or Master’s course. GRE supplements the student’s undergraduate courses and the scores provide common measures for comparing the qualifications of applicants and help in evaluating grades and recommendations

Now with the new revised GRE into picture, the ETS claims this GRE® revised General Test to be more closely aligned with the types of skills that are required to meet today’s demanding graduate and business school expectations.

The skills measured in the new GRE as stated by the ETS are:

The revised Verbal Reasoning section measures your ability to:

• analyze and draw conclusions from discourse; reason from incomplete data; identify author’s assumptions and/or perspective; understand multiple levels of meaning, such as literal, figurative and author’s intent
• select important points; distinguish major from minor or relevant points; summarize text; understand the structure of a text
• understand the meanings of words, sentences and entire texts; understand relationships among words and among concepts Read more…

It can be really frustrating trying to ram in thousands of words into your brain for your GRE exam. Typically, the brain has a threshold limit beyond which it cannot afford to assimilate data unless it is fed through a form that is simple and uncomplicated. It’s similar to wanting to watch TV or play a game on the computer after a hard day of work – it takes a little bit of brainwork to comprehend things in movies and games, but nothing on the levels of academics that might give you a brain-freeze.

It is common knowledge that most of these words are not even used in daily life or even in your academics. The word ‘daguerreotype’ may not appear anywhere in your Masters in Mechanical Engineering in all likelihood, nor will you hear this word being spoken in public because it just refers to the world’s first publicly announced photographic process. Read more…

Featuring new types of questions, the Verbal Reasoning section of the revised test more closely reflects the kind of thinking a student would need in a  graduate or business school.

Here’s a look at what is changing on the Verbal Reasoning Test Section  if you test on or after August 1, 2011.

1)       Antonyms and analogies have been removed from the test, so there are no more questions that test vocabulary out of context.

2)       New Text Completion questions test your ability to interpret, evaluate and reason from what you’ve read. Text Completion questions test this ability by omitting crucial words from short passages, requiring you to fill them in by selecting words or phrases.

3)       New Sentence Equivalence questions test your ability to reach a conclusion about how a sentence should be completed while focusing on the meaning of the whole sentence.

4)       There are more Reading Comprehension questions on the test, including new types of questions, such as selecting multiple correct answer choices instead of just one, or highlighting a sentence within a reading passage to answer the question.

Of course since there are substantial changes to the Verbal Reasoning section of the GRE revised General Test, the score scale for this section is changing, too.

You don’t generally prepare for the GRE exam overnight and take it the next day – this simply doesn’t work even if you’re a master of the language. A person essentially allocates about a month of his time for GRE – reading up on the mode of testing, preparing for the verbal part of the test and taking up mock tests. In case your plans for GRE are not immediate, say spread over six months, I suggest you improve your vocabulary in other ways too – reading newspapers and novels.

For a person with no history of reading habit, he shouldn’t expect to start with Ayn Rand novels and expect to understand what is being narrated. Of course, this could also result in you despising books after this, but it is best to start off slow – not with Enid Blyton as some would suggest. Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock would be good authors to start with, especially if you enjoy crime thrillers. If you’re looking for some books which are more laidback, P.G. Wodehouse and Thomas Hardy are the best choices. Don’t worry about them being English – everybody knows that the British speak better English than Americans; a more purist form of English wouldn’t hurt you. Read more…

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Louis Lavelle and Geoff Gloeckler (editors) reveal the top full-time MBA programs in the U.S 2010 rankings. Next to other highly watch business school rankings such as the Forbes, US and World Report, Financial Times, and The Economist, this ranking is based on three elements: a survey of the most recent MBA graduates (45%), a poll of corporate recruiters (45%), and a calculation of the school’s intellectual-capital rating (10%), based on the number of articles published by faculty in a list of 20 key publications. BW’s rankings only come out every two years making this announcement a little extra exciting.

Here are the top 30 U.S. Business Schools:

1. Booth (Chicago)
2. Harvard
3. Wharton (Penn)
4. Kellogg (Northwestern)
5. Stanford
6. Fuqua (Duke)
7. Ross (Michigan)
8. Haas (UC Berkeley)
9. Columbia
10. Sloan (MIT)
11. Darden (UVA)
12. Cox (SMU)
13. Johnson (Cornell)
14. Tuck (Dartmouth)
15. Tepper (Carnegie Mellon)
16. Kenan-Flagler (UNC Chapel Hill)
17. Anderson (UCLA)
18. Stern (NYU)
19. Kelley (Indiana)
20. Broad (Michigan State)
21. Yale
22. Goizueta (Emory)
23. Georgia Tech
24. Mendoza (Notre Dame)
25. McCombs (UT Austin)
26. Marshall (USC)
27. Marriott (BYU)
28. Carlson (Minnesota)
29. Jones (Rice)
30. Mays (Texas A&M)

You can find the listing released online on Business Week.