So I took a GRE practice exam.....

[Ediacara]

I got a 637 in the math part and 590 in the verbal part. Uh... is that good? The book that came with CD is pretty useful, but doesn't exactly explain how good a good score is....

[slutticus]

1. see this

http://www.800score.com/gre-c1p2.html

[fishwax]

2. I don't know what book you got, but if it's Kaplan, I highly recommend

studying the vocabulary that they recommend in the manner they recommend. You can raise your verbal score by several points in a very short time.

I focused on the verbal, since I'm applying for English programs, and while my pretest verbals were fairly high, the vocab strategies in that book were more helpful than any other preperation.

Basically they list the most common GRE words and divide them by category, so that you can get a sense of what the word means, even if you don't know the actual definition. A sense of the word is really all you need to complete most of the analogies, etc. I made flash cards for all the words/categories, and studied them a few minutes each night. It was very effective.

I know that isn't what you asked, but that's my .02 :)

[MattNC]

3. yea

a lot better than I did after months of studying. *sigh*

how'd you get 637 though? i thought it was like the SAT and only went in multiples of 10.

[Piltdown13]

4. It depends on the schools you're applying to

Some of them require a certain average GRE score for admission (i.e., they average the scores you get per section, and that average needs to meet a certain cutoff point). I've heard that some places require you to average 700, but I'm not sure how common that is. Also, depends on what you're planning to study; they probably won't require super-high verbal scores for those applying to study, say, computer science. But it's always good to score high on the analytical section. :-)

On edit: Looking at the link posted above, it appears that there's now a writing section instead of the analytical. Geez, why didn't they make that change ten years ago?! I did well on the analytical section, but preparing for it kicked my butt.