So I took the GRE last Friday and scored a 311, 158 in verbal, and a 153 in quant. And according to Google, between a 310-320 is competitive. Phew.
I didn’t study as long or as hard as I would have liked to, but I definitely put a lot of hours in. I started looking at example questions back in October, subscribing to the Kaplan Question of the Day, which I would highly recommend. I also started studying GRE vocabulary in October, building a deck of 177 words (maybe 1 of these was on the GRE!) over the subsequent months. So now I can drop words like auspicious, capricious, and kismet in conversations, ha. They also have short workouts you can do. I started studying more heavily probably 1 month before the exam, purchasing 4 practice tests and the QBank. I ended up only taking 2 practice tests and not using the QBank questions at all. It’s very important to take at least 1 practice exam so you can see how fast-paced the quantitative section is. I was shocked.
Through the questions of the day, I was able to take notes regarding my weak areas. I added to these notes after taking the 2 practice tests, unpacking every question I got wrong, and adding vocab words to my deck. I found Manhattan Prep on YouTube to be very valuable for my weak areas, especially exponents (there was 1 question about exponents on the GRE). The Tested Tutor was also very useful for combinations and probability.
The hardest part about the GRE, besides trying to block out the noise of the 6 students that were surrounding me, constantly fidgeting around for some reason, is your speed during the quantitative section. I probably guessed for 8-10 questions on the section, and it’s only 20 questions long. I simply did not have time to even begin those questions. You need to have an answer, even if it’s a guess, for every single question. Do not let the time clock expire without having an answer for everything. What I did was, the second I saw a question and was either like “Yea, I have zero idea how to even approach this” or “This is going to take more than 2 minutes to complete,” I would guess on it, flag it, and move to the next question. Most of the time, I never had time to even revisit that question. It’s that quick. There were entire quant concepts, like statistics (frequency distributions) that I never even studied. There were also quite a few questions about like, there are integers that start with 1, 3, 4, 7, etc. and increase by n + the preceding digit. What are the chances of getting an odd number if there are 100 integers. I tried to math it out, but just couldn’t get the answer.
The other strategy that was very key for me was outlining the verbal passages. They are exhausting to read. And jotting down an outline helped me out a ton. I also skipped some to knock out the vocab questions and then revisited the passages, finding I could focus better knowing I had completed the rest of the section. I had about 5-10 minutes remaining for each verbal section. For the quant section, I ran out of time on both sections (but was sure to guess on the ones I skipped).
But anyway, I did fine and I’m very happy with my score and incredibly relieved that I don’t have to retake it. I should have scheduled it for February so I had plenty of time to take it a second time, but I got lucky. I have exactly 1 month to CASPA!