The ULTIMATE cheatsheet for GRE !!!
I am going to list out the important materials required to prepare for your GRE!
Studying for 2 weeks and taking the exam WILL NOT help you.
PRACTICE is key here, guys!!!
If you could put in 4 - 8 hrs per day for 2 months, that should get you a more than decent score on your exam.
Before going to the cheat sheet, I am just summarizing the pattern of GRE here.
Feel free to skip if you know this.
- When you begin the exam, you start with ANALYTICAL WRITING which will be scored out of 6.
- The analytical writing section will be to write 2 essays. There will be 30 minutes for each essay.
- After the essay writing, you move to the important parts, where your Math and English are tested, which will form your GRE score.
- The exam has 2 parts :- QUANTITATIVE and VERBAL.
Each one is out of 170. So your GRE score will be on a total of 340. - There will be 2 verbal sections and 2 quantitative sections and 1 experimental section which will NOT be scored. The experimental section could be either quant or verbal.
- In total you would be taking 5 sections, (either 3 verbal, 2 quant or 3 quant, 2 verbal). But you would never know which of these is the experimental section. So, DO NOT TAKE ANY SECTION LIGHTLY, thinking that could be experimental. The ETS guys use this experimental section to evaluate the difficulty level of questions.
- Each section will contain 20 questions each.
- There will be 30 minutes for verbal sections and 35 minutes for quantitative sections.
- Optional 10 min break after the third section and 1 min break between sections.
So here are the list of study materials :-
QUANTITATIVE
- If you not too great at doing mental math, check this game out. This should give you a start at simple mental calculations.
- Subscribe to Magoosh and work out the questions . They have some great questions, detailed answers and practice tests.
- Practice Manhattan 5 pound book. You will have the basics right by then.
- Practice the ETS Official Guide.
- Do Manhattan practice tests and then magoosh practice tests. Practice test questions will be difficult but will help you level up. If you buy any manhattan book, you will get the practise tests for free. Or you could buy the tests alone.
- Do the ETS POWERPREP test. This is the toughest of the lot.
VERBAL :-
- Start with learning the vocabulary as early as possible. There is no point attempting Text Completion questions and Sentence Equivalence questions, without knowing vocab. So dont touch those for the first 20 days. Stick to wordlists on vocabulary.com. Some free mobile apps that could help with vocabulary are Magoosh Vocabulary Builder and Magoosh Flashcards. These do not beat Vocabulary.com though.
- View Magoosh videos, answer questions and view their answer explanations - answer explanation is the most important part. To crack vocab questions you will have to recognise keywords and patterns in the questions. You will get the hang of it after you do a lot of practice questions.
- Other practice material - Manhattan 5 pound book and Aristotle - they will show you some crazy words that you will never see on the GRE, but other than that there is lot of practice material
Aristotle book is not exactly GRE level. But will help you get familiar with the format.
Reading comprehension
Practice with above materials. But before doing so see this video
- This is a GMAT video series my husband saw when preparing for gmat. Watch https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/thursdays-with-ron/
- Equivalent GRE videos - I haven't watched this, but you may find useful.
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gre/mondays-with-neil/
Analytical writing
You could prepare by writing essays on topics from the Issue topic pool and the Argument topic pool
Other tips to help you with time management
Read both part 1 and part 2
Now, that is all you need for prep. If this doesn't get you a good score, I don't know what will!!!
So, do your preparations and concentrate like never before during your exam.
Wish you all the best!
KEEP CALM AND FOCUS! YOU CAN DO IT!
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