Biggest discrepancy between math and verbal scores on GRE/SAT

[Greeksquared]

I scored 290 points lower on the verbal section (lived in US my whole life) of the GRE than I did on the math. I am posting this partly because I believe I have some sort of attention defecit and am wondering if anyone else is in the same boat as me and if there is any kind of relationship here.

I have a lot of trouble retaining information that I just read and piecing it together logically. But, I have an amazing ability to do short simple math problems quicker than most anybody. I am also probably in the lower 20 percent of people when it comes to recalling moive lines or music.

Im just tired of having to reread everything over and over to understand.

How big of a difference did you have in your scores?
Is anyone else like me?

[dardo]

You just seem a smart guy who is not centered. It's not an easy thing to solve and live with, but it's something a lot of people is suffering actually.

Too many things in our lives. I would suggest a more quite live, specially little television, films and video games.

Feel fortunate, you could be dumb and not centered.

[ElDuque]

750 - 570 = 180

[goofball]

790M
560V

[ski]

790M 520V Holla.

Also, a 800 on verbal is WAY WAY WAY tougher to get than an 800 in math. Look at the statistics on GREs website. Like only 1% get above a 650 or so I think.

[SuperPokerJedi]

Those with scientific degrees are a 1/4 more employable than those with Arts - stick in there with the reading and you're sure to have an advantage over the 'usual' crowd!

[swingdoc]

780 720

Seriously, you should consider talking with your family doctor or with your school's academic help center about the possibility of a learning disorder (not calling you retarded or anything like that, they can test for specific difficulties with reading/retention) or ADD. ADD is certainly a hot diagnosis right now, although to be fair if you prescribe Ritalin or another stimulant to just about anyone, they'll perform better academically. BTW, what grad program are you going into?

[NickMPK]

The GRE is a strange test in that anyone who remembers early high school math is capable of getting an 800 on Math; the only reason you wouldn't is if you are careless. But there is basically no way to know all of the obscure words that show up on the Verbal, and some of the reading comprehesion questions can be a bit subjective, so Verbal scores among top end students tend to be much lower.

That said, I got a perfect score on both. :P

[SplawnDarts]

My GREs were
800M
800L
640V
back when they still had a logic section.

So that's a bit smaller than yours I guess... I got an unlucky set of vocab words though - on many previous yeas I would have scored much higher.

[rory]

You are probably going to have to accept that this is just how your mind works. My mind works kind of similarly-- I am pretty good at coming up with theories to describe things or designing experiments or figuring out solutions to problems and what not but my memory is absolutely horrible. I can go to a talk and not be able to remember what was said at the talk an hour later even though I understood it completely while I was there. When people say absent minded professor they mean me.

It doesn't sound like you have the same sort of problem remembering things, though. If you have a problem with comprehending things when you are reading them you are just going to have to accept it and learn to deal with it. In our culture for some reason we are taught that if you are smart you do not have to apply effort to things and so applying effort seems like a failing instead of a good thing. Applying effort above and beyond what "other people" have to do is viewed as bad. But that is not true.

Your mind is very good at one thing and very bad at the other. So you just have to accept that your mind is very bad at the one thing and learn to work in such a way that you minimize the amount of problems it causes you. For my memory problem, for example, I carry around a notebook and I write everything down, even things I know I will remember because I always forget those. If I am talking to someone and they start asking me for details about something like a scientific paper I read or something and I can't remember them, I just say to them that I cannot remember but if they want to wait I can send them an email or we can swing by my desk and I can give them the details.

For your reading comprehension troubles I would recommend being a little more methodical about how you read things. Using a scientific paper as an example I would skim over the whole paper first so I got a clear idea of the big picture in my head. Then I would go look at all of the figures and get an idea of what they were trying to show. Then I would go read the whole paper. Finally I would do a little diagram in the margin that was like why they did this -> what experiments they did -> what did they show -> how did they interpret it, to make sure I had it straight in my head. Come up with little systems to help yourself for whatever task you are doing. It might help you to summarize everything when you read it. Or take notes in the margins. Or read a little bit and think about it for a while and come back to it. It's not bad that you are slower to comprehend when you read. Maybe you are slower but you understand more deeply. Either way the only way you are going to not have it be a major problem for you is to come up with tricks to deal with it.