Happy New Year!

Remember when I said that I was going to write while I was in North Carolina? Haha...didn't happy obviously! I was having too much fun with family. I did study though! I've been doing a lot of studying. The pile of GRE books at my feet really is incredible. I just carried it and my laptop downstairs and that has proven to be an arduous and onerous task indeed.

Dare I write New Year's resolutions?

"I'm going to study for the GRE more."

Okay!

Here's what I accomplished since I last wrote:

Completed the Princeton Review's Word Smart for the GRE 2nd Edition, one of the books that my friend had given me. She had done up to Quick Quiz 21, leaving 22 to 65 to be done. Finished the book in a couple of days. It was a long car ride, after all. The only things that I did not pay much attention to were the Final Exam Drills where the testee would have to make a sentence. This kind of exercise is supposed to help with analogies, but I didn't have much patience for them, I think because it wasn't going fast enough. I just might go back and do them.

Been working in Barron's Essential Words for the GRE, the very first GRE prep book I got (during the summer...barely worked on it) and I should be done by tomorrow. I've realized that through studying by vocabulary has definitely gone up and I recognize words that I recently learned. So, that's good!

Been working on the Princeton Review's Cracking the GRE 2010 Edition and I started on the Hit Parade, like I wrote about in a previous post, but I'm going to hold off for a little bit and do them all at once.

Stared at the Kaplan prep book, opened it for a few seconds, and decided not to use it yet.

Started working on the math sections in the Barron's book and realized that I hate math. I got a 12/15 on the General Math Strategies Practice Exercises and a 5/15 on the discrete quantitative practices exercises (YEAH...I know. Gross). So, respectively, those are Chapter 10 and 11. Chapter 12 is on quantitative comparison questions and I got a 12/15 on the practice exercises for it. Chapter 13 is about data interpretation questions and I got an 6/15 on it (gross as well...I need to work on these more).

Chapter 14 is "Mathematics Review" and I actually really like this chapter because it has these awesome things that they call "Key Facts", of which I've taken the liberty of starting to write them down. It would probably be easier to type them all up, but I like having them all on a few sheets of paper that I can study from instead of on a laptop. (Sure, I could print it. Leave me alone, I want to write them.) Here's how I've done on the practice exercises on specific subjects within the chapter:

Basic Arithmetic: 17/25
Fractions and Decimals: 22/25
Percents: unfinished.

The practice exercises on percents is unfinished as of right now because I sort of got frustrated in doing it and stopped.

So that's what I've done in addition to celebrating New Year's Eve, New Years, having family dinners, and generally having a good time.

I just realized that the CD-ROM that came with the book is missing...I'm wondering if my boyfriend has it.

This is exciting: I did an entire paper GRE practice test! I timed myself and everything...aren't you proud? It was General Test GR86-2 in ETS's Practicing to Take the GRE General Test 10th Edition. That means that I still haven't been able to do much practice on writing, but here are my scores for it:

Verbal Ability,Section 1: 30/38 (questions I got wrong: 6, 10, 12, 14, 16, 22, 24, and 35)
Verbal Ability,Section 3: 28/38 (questions I got wrong: 6, 7, 13, 21, 27, 33, 34, 36, 37, and 38)
Quantitative Ability, Section 2: 23/30 (questions I got wrong: 9, 11, 13, 20, 26, 29, and 30)
Quantitative Ability, Section 4: 24/30 (questions I got wrong: 11, 15, 18, 24, 25, and 30)

That means that I got a 610 on Verbal and 650 on Quantitative! That's a 1260, a significant improvement on the scores that I got on the Diagnostic Test that was in the Barron's book! Whoopee, this whole studying thing is working!

In consideration of the fact that I took the test in the comfort of my own room and know that I should get used to testing in any environment (so that what is happening around me affects me less), I'm going to test myself in various places. I'm considering asking friends if I could go to their houses so that I can take a practice test. You might think that I'm kidding...but I'm not.

In other news (that doesn't have to do with the GRE and what I feel like talking about because this is my blog...), the pipes are frozen and I can't go take a shower. I could go study more...but I don't want to right now!

Update on the Barron's CD-ROM

So... really all that is on the CD-ROM is the two tests that it says it has. No other perquisites. Bleh.

In addition to that, someone who wants to assess their strengths and weaknesses has to finish an entire test! Say for example I wanted to just see how I would do on the mathematics section. I wouldn't be able to do that on this CD-ROM! Boo that!

I guess that I'm going to have to hold off on working on the CD-ROM until I want to actually try taking a full test. What a waste of frikkin' time! Valuable study time! Grrrr, Barron's... already getting on my bad side.