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by tokenadult 6368 days ago
"I heard a rumor"

I'm a counterexample to the rumor.

2 comments

Me too. Somehow I aced the verbal section, with a moderate amount of study, starting ~6 weeks before the test. I think it might be because I was raised without a TV and so read a lot as a kid. The questions at the end of the test (it's adaptive, computer administered) seemed to focus on the exact nuance of similar words.
And the jury's out on any correlation to my success.
99% percentile on verbal. Didn't really study for it though, just read a lot as a kid and had the fortune to have studied Latin.

Worth mentioning that my life doesn't correlate to success in any meaningful way, except that I keep making decisions which make me happy if poor.

Agreeing with both replies to me, I think the secret of my success on the GRE verbal section (twice) was reading a lot for fun. And agreeing with them about correlations between GRE success and life success, I still pursue a lot of personal intellectual interests but have not become notably wealthy, although any middle-class American is wealthy in worldwide terms.