Hello All. The percentage of people giving the GRE for B-School applications have been increasing over the years. A couple of years back I gave the GRE and scored 330. At that time I had made a guide for studying for the GRE ( https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/gre-study-… ). However that was based on my experiences of 5 years ago.
I recently gave the GRE at Home and this time scored 330+ (equivalent to a 750 GMAT) while working full time and thought may be an updated guide will help someone out in the future. To be honest its my old guide but have tweaked it further and streamlined it making it sort of a version 2.0. It took me about 2.5 months to cover the following topics but the lock down helped me massively as I was not partying out on weekends. In general 3 months should be enough to cover all the materials suggested here:
Quants: Manhattan Prep GRE Strategy Guides, MGRE 5lb, ETS OG & ETS Quantitative Reasoning
Verbal: Manhattan Prep GRE Strategy Guides, GRE Big Book (the secret sauce that most GRE students don't use), ETS OG, ETS Verbal Reasoning, Manhattan 500 Essential and Advanced Wordlist, Barrons 800 word list, Barrons 333 High Frequency word list, GMAT CR Bible (optional).
Mocks: ETS Power Prep ( I & II, Paper Based I & II), ETS Power Prep Plus (I, II & III).
Routine: 1.5 hrs Quants/day + 1.5 hrs of Verbal/day (2-3 hours on the weekends)
For Quants:
- Start with Manhattan strategy guides. Do all questions no matter how simple. Move on to Manhattan 5lb and then ETS OG and ETS Quantitative Reasoning. This will take around 3 months. Also right from the beginning maintain a correction copy. Redo all the sums that you got wrong there and create a list of the most common mistakes that you re making. GRE Quants is not very difficult. Its the silly errors which will get you. Once you start creating an error list you'll be cognizant about it and can make strategies to combat them. In case you finish the above materials before 3 months redo all the questions that you had got wrong. If you still have time on your hands you can do Princeton 1041 questions. However, let me warn you that the book is riddled with errors.
For Verbal:
Study 50 words every day until you finish all word lists and keep revising them. Do this first thing in the morning with a fresh mind (may be on your commute etc). Every day revise the previous days words before doing the next 50 words.This will take around 1 hour. The rest 30 min use it to practice RC. Also try reading one article form aldaily.com to get used to reading dry, boring passages.
Take the GRE Big Book and do its RCs without timing yourself at the beginning even if that means you're taking 30 mins to do so. The main purpose of this exercise is to get your mind used to the difficult RC language as well as to understand what the question is asking. Here your main objective is to get questions correct as it will train your mind to eliminate wrong answers. For this use greprepclub.com. They have solved question for GRE Big Book RC passages and will help you understand when you make a mistake. Do this until you are getting at least 80% of the questions correct on a regular basis. It will take about 1 month. To approach RC question I'll suggest that you check GreGmat's channel on youtube. It was instrumental for me.
Then start timing yourself. You should read the RC and answer all its questions in (1.5 x No. of quesitons) min. So for an RC with 4 questions you should finish it in 6 minutes. This will again take time as increase in speed will reduce accuracy. Keep practicing until you're getting 80% of the questions correct. The Big Book also has CR questions that you can practice from it. If you're having problems in CR read GMAT CR Bible to see how to approach these questions.
Once you've reached this stage start doing the ETS OG followed by ETS Verbal Reasoning. Should take you about 3 months to get here.
Mock Test:
- ETS provides a total of 7 mock tests. I strongly believe ETS mocks are the only mocks one should practice if one is able to afford it. Since you're working full time the only time to give full length mock tests are during the weekend. So from 7 weekends before your official test date start giving full length mock tests under test conditions (eg: I realised that I should not be drinking loads of water in the 10 min break because then I'll get the urgent need to pee that I need to hold back for the next 1.5 hours until the exam is over). I will suggest to give it on Saturday and either review it immediately after or on Sunday (I preferred Sunday since it allowed me one day in a week where I could just review my test and chill). Log your corrections in the Correction copy so that later you can go through and practice the problems.
My takeaways from preparing for the GRE:
During this entire process don't be afraid to form your own strategies that you are comfortable with to answer questions. You'll find many strategies for different questions online but use the one that suits you the most. Also you can test out these strategies in your earlier mocks to see if you can implement them under actual test condition.
Don't get dejected looking at your mock scores if they are below your target. My mock test scores ranged from 330 to 322 and to be honest it is a little depressing when you don't see your score improving while you're juggling studying with a job. Investigate thoroughly why and where did you go wrong? Is your approach correct? Keep questioning your scores and find ways to get better. If you do this your actual score will be much better than your mock scores.
I strongly believe in not giving mocks 2/3 days before the GRE since if the score is not great it can affect your confidence. 2/3 days before the GRE just revise all your words and go over your correction notebook to rezig your memory about the type of mistakes you need to be careful about.
On the day of the GRE stay calm and give the exam.
