How to prepare for the GRE

Friends and acquaintances often ask me how I prepared for the GRE exam. This owes itself to the fact that I did reasonably well at the exam. For the benefit of those who may seek them, in this post I present my views on the GRE and the method I used to prepare for it. I assume a reasonable familiarity with the exam. Also, what follows is my own opinion and by no means a definitive guide to the GRE.

A few observations to start with:

1. The GRE is, at best, a necessary evil. Different universities give your score different levels of importance. Since one can never know how much importance your dream university gives to your GRE score, it’s a good idea to do well. The objective should be to study as efficiently as possible in a very limited amount of time, get done with it ASAP and quickly go back to doing something fun or useful.
2. The time required to prepare well varies for each individual. Don’t trust someone else’s estimate.

3. There are lakhs of words in the English language. You can’t possibly know them all in 5 lifetimes. Buy just one wordlist (Barrons/Kaplan/Other) and do it well. Don’t get distracted by the abundance of study material.

4. Accept the fact that luck can play a significant role in this exam.

5. Studying wordlists is NOT a waste of time. Most of those words, you will come across in the stuff you read. The GRE asks simple words that are in common use, but have different meanings in different contexts. If you waste time learning long, esoteric words of no consequence; you’re to blame, not the GRE.

6. Starting to cultivate a habit of reading 6 months before your GRE, in an effort to boost your vocabulary is not a good idea. Reading for the fun of it is great, but if you think it will boost your GRE score, you’re wrong.

7. Preparing for the Analytical Writing section has a very small profit margin. But if you think you’re bad at writing, some practice is surely useful.

The Quant section:

This consists of simple arithmetic, geometry, probability and statistics. Most students have no difficulty scoring in this section. Aiming for anything less than 800 here is unacceptable. The biggest challenge here is complacency, which often costs students a few points. Beware of this fact and all shall be well.

Verbal Section:

This is where a lot of us tend to falter. The verbal section tests 3 basic skills/abilities:

1. Your vocabulary

2. Your ability to put that vocabulary to use

3. Your ability to comprehend passages of an academic nature ( such as those that you will be regularly required to read as part of your Master’s Degree coursework).

Doing well in the verbal section requires one to be reasonably adept at all 3 of these. If you develop just 1 or 2 of these, the only way to do well is through getting lucky. So lets deal with each of these 3 one by one.

How to build your vocabulary?
This is what I did. This is what I recommend. It consists of the following steps:

Step 1: Buy the Barrons Guide to GRE

Step 2: Learn the Barrons Wordlist

Step 1 is fairly simple. Step 2 is not so simple. Proficiency at Step 2 varies for each individual. The Barrons wordlist has around 5000 words. Now, 5000 words is very, very intimidating. However, a lot of these are simple words that we are familiar with. The time you need for finishing the wordlist (and remembering all the words!) depends mainly on how many of them you already know. If you’re exceptional at mugging you have a great advantage, but you don’t really need to mug.

My objective was to finish the wordlist in as little time as possible. I developed the following method, which many of my friends have found useful:
1. Make a 200 page notebook for your wordlist studies.

2. Find a bright, well ventilated place to study. This is important since the wordlist tends to make one extremely sleepy. I preferred the mornings for reading the wordlist.

3. Open the first wordlist and start reading.

4. One by one, read all the words, their meanings and the sentence examples given.

5. When you’re done, read the whole wordlist again. But this time, use a pencil and make a small “-” sign against the words you don’t already know. Even if have half an idea about what a word means, mark it. Read all the words and meanings carefully as you mark them. For example, you are likely to know what “abundant” means, and there is no chance that you will ever forget what it means; so don’t mark that. But say, you don’t know what “acclivity” means. Mark that.

6. After marking the whole list ( typically 75-100 words), write down all the words in your notebook, one below the other. Do not write the meanings of the words. But read the meanings of the words that you write.

7. Now, after writing all the words, once again go through the wordlist and write down the meanings opposite the words in your notebook.

8. Now read the word-meanings in your notebook.

9. The above process will take from 45 minutes to 2 hours, depending on your ability. If you have done it right, you have revised all the difficult words in the list 5 times. Yes, 5 times in an hour. Now forget about the wordlist for the rest of the day.

10. After a reasonable time, say 10-12 hours, open your notebook again, cover the meanings and test yourself to see how many word-meanings you remember. You will ( or rather, should) find that you remember quite a few. Make a small * before the ones you don’t remember.

11. In one day, you have revised the unfamiliar words 6 times. If you’re fast, it took you just an hour for revising words 6 times. If you’re slow, it took you 2 hours. That’s still quite efficient.

12. Do the next wordlist the next day. Revise the previous days words in your notebook as well. As you progress, keep revising all the notebook lists from that week. All you need to revise are the words marked with an *.

13. Once you’re comfortable with this method, and if it starts working for you, you can modify it an way you like. The idea is that at every stage you make a fresh list of the words you don’t know at that stage. There will be many stages. I studied 3 wordlists a day, finished the book in 15 days and then kept revising for 15-20 days. You may start with 2000 words in your notebook and have 800 words marked with an *. The objective is that on the day before the GRE, you should have no words marked with an *.

What not to do?

Learn from Flashcards: Flashcards don’t give sentences and therefore, no context to the words. It’s hard to remember words this way. When you read words in alphabetical order, you develop some associations. This can be of help.

Ability to use your newly acquired vocabulary

The GRE doesn’t ask you word meanings. It tests you on antonyms, sentence completion and correlations between words. If you know what the words mean, there shouldn’t be much problem. Practice exercises are available easily on the internet and in the Barrons CD.

Reading Comprehension:

The complexity of some of the passages can seem daunting to start with, but the questions are the most predictable of all. A little practice, and you should have no problems with this.

Practice Tests:

I recommend taking the Kaplan & Princeton practice tests and the GRE Powerprep.

My friend Rohit has compiled a list of study material available online. Though I never used any of that, you can peruse that here.

A final word : Don’t follow anyone’s advice blindly. DO what works for you. This is an easy exam. Decide how much time you want to devote to studying (as less as possible), what your current command of English is and what realistic score are you aiming at. Then start studying.

This is all the perspective and opinions I have to offer. If you found any of this useful, do write me a comment or an email (It will make me really happy J).