GRE Tips

As I have taken the GRE, I am in a good position to give you some tips. For most of the international students the verbal portion is tough. Going through those wordlist is a torture that everybody would like to avoid. Though some of us manage to go through those word lists, there are very few who can remember more than 80% of those words. So I recommend following techniques:-

Start preparing 3 or 4 months before the exam. Rather than having a full month preparation before the exam, it's better to allocate few hours a day for 3 or 4 months.

The most effective way to prepare is to learn all the words from a dictionary but that's not possible. Most of us use Barron's book for word lists so it’s better to go through those words and learn them. It’s natural that you won’t able to memorize those words just reading once. So try to revise the words and see how much you can remember. Mark the words that you forget and try revising them again. This iterative approach would really help you remember. In addition to that or if you cannot do that, I suggest following: Collect the frequent lists from different books like Kaplan, Barron, Arco, Princeton Review and try to memorize those words. These words are the words that generally appear in the exam.

Make the habit of reading different articles from New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington post etc. While reading those collect the words that are new to you. Also, focus on the punctuation and sentence structure that's being used as this can be helpful for your Analytical Writing Assessment preparation.
Also try to use the vocabulary that you have learnt. Using it will not only help you memorize but also enhance your ability to select appropriate words for the context at hand? This skill will certainly benefit you beyond the GRE for rest of your life.

Don't be too ambitious. I know some of us out there are too ambitious and try to memorize all those words out there. Though it might be possible for some, others generally seem to spoil their score because they miss out the shades of meanings of the words. They do know more words but they don't know it well as they should know it. Keep in mind you shouldn't miss out on questions that asks the words that you already know. The moral is: prepare for the core portion of the tests, not for those 3 or 4 questions that are likely to ask awkward words. You can always guess in those awkward cases.

For Quantitative sections I would recommend to follow Barron's and Nova's book. These two books cover the questions that generally appear on the GRE test. Sometimes GRE springs surprise by asking advanced questions that requires knowledge of higher mathematics. But remember, you are not preparing for those questions. There are 1 or 2 of them and their difficulty level is high. So if you get those questions wrong your score is very unlikely to be affected. Keep in mind the fact- even if you get 2 or 3 questions wrong you can still score 800.

These are based on my experiences you aren't obliged to follow it. If you have some other ideas that work for you, then it's fine. But I would love to hear your ideas. Please do post your ideas.