For most GRE aspirants, achieving a perfect or near-perfect score on the GRE is an impossible dream. In case most of you are new to the GRE, a perfect GRE score is
170 (perfect quant) + 170 (perfect verbal) = 340
Recently, one student made himself proud by scoring a 170 (perfect) on quant and 168 (near perfect) on the verbal section. Since then, many students are inquiring about the number of questions he got right in each part of the test to get this score. To answer that, we got his official score report from the ETS, and it seems that you can get a perfect Math score on the GRE by getting a question or two wrong. For the verbal section, one can get a near-perfect score by getting 5-6 questions wrong. To get a perfect quant score, the maximum you can get wrong is two questions – for verbal, you can get three questions incorrect and still get a perfect score.
It is a myth that Engineers cannot get good verbal scores. But this perfect scorer is an engineer, which shows that engineers can get top-notch verbal scores. There is another myth that only voracious readers of novels can get such scores on the English section – he proves that myth wrong as well. This student had no GRE vocabulary at all, and he memorized 800-900 words a couple of weeks before his exam day. He has never been an avid reader of the English language except sporadically reading things that interest him.
Getting a high score on the GRE does not require hundreds of hours of effort if your basics are right. You need to get the right content and emphasize mastering your concepts, techniques, and strategies. I have seen students solve thousands of questions to prepare for GRE and end up getting average scores and then complain. This is the wrong strategy – instead of working tons of questions, the best way to prepare is to grasp the concepts and techniques of the various topics and question types. Then it would help if you solved a few problems to consolidate that technique.
In his post-exam performance, this student stated that he never answered more than 40 questions per topic once he understood the strategies.
He solved around 500 questions for quant, learned 800-900 new words, and solved 50-60 reading passages and 150 questions on the text completions and equivalence.
He did best because he spent more time mastering his approach to a problem and then topped it up with 10-12 full-length practice tests to build stamina of working through a 4-hour long exam.
It’s simple, if you study for the GRE with questions and books that do not accurately reflect what you’ll see test day, you will never get a good GRE score. You would be under the false impression that you worked so hard for the test and couldn’t score well, whereas, in the first place, you studied the wrong stuff. So the moral of the story is: work hard but use the right content and prepare a strategy for your GRE prep.
Below are his GRE score reports for your analysis and purview.
Quant Score Report GRE:
Verbal Score Report GRE:
