My Aim at GRE

How I Prepared for GRE and ended up with a decent score?

I gave my GRE on 5th Oct 2011. I am glad to say that I managed to score 318/340 [Verbal: 157, Quantitative: 161].

GRE test can be a nightmare for the students with average vocabulary. Even I was one among them. All I learnt was that with sheer dedication and passion, one can score a decent score. I will explain how I prepared for my GRE.

I booked my GRE date 3 months earlier i.e. July. So I spent 3-4 months for preparation. Before starting preparation, I made a research over internet about the difficulty level of the questions that are being asked in GRE. I soon realized that my 90% of the preparation should be devoted for vocabulary. Since the quantitative section has questions with the difficulty level of 10th grade questions, I thought of touching that section only before 1 month of the date of the exam.

I referred following books/materials for my preparation

1. Word power made easy

2. Cracking the New GRE - Princeton Review

3. Barron's for word list

4. ETS Official guide.

5. www.majortests.com

First 2 months:

I started my preparation with Word power made easy. It is a wonderful book that approaches words with their roots. One can add at least 300-400 words to their word list by going through this book completely. I suggest you to start with this book if you have enough time i.e 3-4 months for exam and your vocabulary is mediocre. This book helped me gain confidence as I was able to identify meanings of a few of the words in Barron's list which I started later.

So initial 1 month was spent in referring word power made easy. Then I started with Barron's word list. Barron's word list offers a 3500 extensive set of words which is more than enough to score high score in vocabulary. And its really a pain to remember all those words. I started with going through 1 word list every day. During the same time, I started referring Princeton review for sentence completion, text completion and RC. Princeton review offers some good strategies for handling these questions. However I was not able to get the problems correct as I was still in a process of building my vocabulary. So I learnt all the strategies and parallely built my vocabulary by Barron’s word list.

Third month:

In the 3rd month, I just concentrated on word list. Many of the times, I was feeling demotivated as I was not able to recollect words and I was not able to solve questions just because I didn’t know some words in the question. But I knew that by the time of exam, I will have a strong vocabulary and I can handle those questions. I had completed all the problems offered by Princeton and I started solving questions from majortests.com. It is a very good site and it offers numerous GRE verbal and quantitative questions. The difficulty level of the RC in that site is too high and I used to struggle concentrate on the passages. Because of the difficulty of the questions, I used to lose concentration in between reading passages. But ultimately practicing more number of RC from that site helped me to overcome it.

Last month:

In the last month, I started giving some practice tests that are present in Princeton. Initially I scored pretty less, 151 in verbal and 162 in quantitative. I was doing well in quantitative section but I still needed to improve in verbal section. Time management became crucial while giving exam and I realized it after taking 1 mock test. So I started solving verbal questions from majortest.com by timing it and after a few days, when I took my second mock test, my scores significantly improved. Along with practice tests I solved the problems from ETS official guide. ETS guide will have the questions whose caliber equals the actual GRE questions. Solving those questions will tell you where actually you stand.

Some tips:

Verbal section preparation strategies

1. Building a strong vocabulary is highly essential. Go through the entire word list given in Barron's. Don’t give up as initially you will find very difficult to remember words. After a rigorous 3 month preparation, you will be surprised when you are able to identify many of the words.
2. RC, if not prepared well, can significantly damage your score in the actual exam. Do not panic. Practice as many problems as possible.
3. Strategies given in Princeton Review can be really handy while solving sentence equivalence and text completion. 
   
   
   Quantitative section preparation strategies

1. If you refer Barron's for quantitative, then it’s far more sufficient. As long as your basics are good, you can refer any of the books. One should not be over-confident which may lead to making silly mistakes because of overlooking/ignoring the problems.
   
   
   Analytical writing preparation strategies

1. One cannot manage to come up with a decent essay and score an average of 4 out of 6 unless he/she practices seriously. Time management can be a serious challenge. It’s quite hard to articulate things and then write 4 paragraphs about issue topic in just 30 minutes
2. Issue topics: Practice at least 10 issue based essays before you go to exam. One has to support his claim about the topic by citing real world examples. Go through the categories of questions given in the Prep books and note down the examples on which you can explain. This will surely come handy during exam as you get only 30 min to brainstorm and write.
3. Argument topics: Practicing 4-5 topics can be sufficient. Argument section will be little easy as you have to find loopholes in the given passage. Just decide the template that you follow so that you can quickly write things in exam.
   
   
   This is all about how I prepared for GRE and managed to score decent percentile. Keep in mind, I had a mediocre vocabulary. So even you can score well if you prepare for 3 months very hard and follow the tips that I have given. Well, good luck and post your comments on our blog about your experience.