How important is vocabulary to the GRE? Can you get a 320 + GRE to score on the GRE if your vocabulary is not vast?

There are a lot of myths about the relationship between a student’s vocabulary skills and his GRE score. And, most of these myths are not true. Let’s explain further.

You know that the GRE is scored on a scale of 260 to 340. So, you can score a maximum of 80 points.

Of these 80 points, 40 points are for the Quantitative Reasoning section. So, you do not need any special vocabulary to get these 40 points.

Of the 40 points to be scored in the Verbal Reasoning section, 20 points are from Reading Comprehension questions. To get 100% accuracy in the RC section, you need to master reading and elimination techniques, not great vocabulary.

The remaining 20 points of the Verbal Reasoning section come from Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions. Approximately half of these questions are more reasoning based and vocabulary. So, it is quite possible to get 10 points if your reasoning skills are good.

As you can see above if you concentrate on your Math section, and reading and reasoning skills, you can get 70 of the available 80 points quite comfortably, and thereby, get 330 out of 340 even with an average vocabulary. Students, however, make the mistake of devoting more than 50% of their GRE prep time on learning words. If you think you need to enhance your vocabulary, then you need to do it in a less time-consuming manner.

The Jamboree Vocabulary Method is the most efficient way to learn and revise the high-frequency GRE words. We have collated approximately 1800 words that appear most frequently in the GRE. These 1800 words are split into 14 Word Lists. The words in each list are divided into groups with similar meanings. There are about 325 such groups. So, instead of learning individual meanings of the 1800 words, you will learn only 325 meanings. This technique will ensure that you learn more words in less time.

Let’s try this out with Jamboree’s Word List 1. There are 100 words, and these 100 words are divided into 16 groups/meanings.

Download the GRE Word list by Jamboree