I am currently applying to graduate school (Aerospace Engineering) and need to take (and do well on) the GRE. I took it without preparation and did fairly well, well enough to meet requirements. However, I never like to 'meet requirements'. So back to the GRE for me, and this time I have to study!
The most room for improvement was as expected on my verbal. This means studying vocab (oh no!). I talked to a few folks and did some research and found the common knowledge was to use flash cards and the study books. I found a few lists, but they had thousands of words… I have been programming too long to find myself in a foreach loop making flash cards by hand. That's how it started.
Approximately one month later I had developed a GRE vocabulary study tool (www.greparty.com). The project started small, grab the words and snatch some definitions to make flash cards. Then I become victim of feature creep. It went something like this.
- Track my progress
- Dynamically add words
- Parse a whole dictionary (unabridged)
- Add a thesaurus to track synonyms and antonyms
- Expand it for friends (they showed interest)
- Add scoring
- Redesign the database for robustness
- Add a small library.
- Add in use context.
- Adding new quiz types word-definition, definition-word and complete the sentence.
- Countless small additions and fixes.
Some small flash card app, doh!
Some good things however, I finally used MVC and SQL 2008 in a robust start to finish application along with SQLMetal and LINQ.
Check it out, www.greparty.com, for those familiar with MVC I'm sure you will recognize the design :-)