Here’s what I’ve learned from tak­ing the GRE…twice.  It’s not a lot of fun.  We all learn dif­fer­ent­ly.  I wish test mak­ers and school admin­is­tra­tors would real­ize that these types of assess­ments are not nec­es­sar­i­ly indica­tive of how well one will do in a grad­u­ate pro­gram.  Until then, here are some tips I gath­ered for all you coura­geous souls!

Tools You’ll Need & Things To Con­sid­er

1.  Give your­self ample time to study the mate­r­i­al.  I rec­om­mend at least 3 months of dai­ly effort.  I don’t mean give your­self 3 months and pick 1 Sat­ur­day per week to go over a cou­ple of prob­lems.  Real­ly put in some elbow grease and spend at least 1 hour per day.

1.5  Pick one good GRE book.  Do not buy sev­er­al; you’ll only end up open­ing one.

2.  Use, use and abuse FREE online tuto­ri­als.  There are quite a few that were very help­ful.  If you’re going to take the time, there are full Alge­bra, and Geom­e­try cours­es on YouTube that will only add val­ue to your GRE Prep Jour­ney.  There’s a whole uni­ver­si­ty online and it’s free!  I rec­om­mend Pro­fes­sor Leonard for Inter­me­di­ate Alge­bra.  Andrews Tutor­ing is awe­some.   Magoosh­GRE and Per­fect Scores by Push­pin­der Gill are my favorite.  They real­ly focus on going over the types of prob­lems you will encounter.  Again, depend­ing on the time you’ve allo­cat­ed for this exam, choose your resources care­ful­ly.

3.  Review actu­al GRE prob­lems and get very famil­iar with the way the test is struc­tured.  If you can afford to, take more than one exam and if you prepped for less than a month and did­n’t do well, you ought to con­sid­er retak­ing it, absolute­ly.  Keep in mind that you can take the test mul­ti­ple times, but they need to be at least 30 days apart.  Make sure you time this with your desired school and their dead­lines.  The one cool thing is that if you did lousy, (and you’ll know if you did at the end of the exam), you do not have to send your scores any­where.  You can keep them to your­self and use them as a bench­mark for high­er scor­ing.  This is one advan­tage the GRE has over the GMAT.

4.  The test costs $195 in CA and if you’re cur­rent­ly enrolled school, you could prob­a­bly get a fee reduc­tion.  It does take about 4 weeks to process, how­ev­er.  If you have the time, I high­ly rec­om­mend it as it will save you about 50%.

5.  Bring an ID, of course and arrive on time.  On time for Capri­corns means ear­ly. If you’re on time you’re late!  If you’re not a U.S. Cit­i­zen, bring prop­er doc­u­men­ta­tion.  Oh and for the love of GOD sign up for your exam well in advance.  The seats fill up fast, and unless you feel like dri­ving to Bak­ers­field, sign up right away.

6.  Get some rest and ease up on the liq­uid intake.  Please don’t attempt the Mas­ter Cleanse on the day of your exam. Once the test starts the timer is on and you’re in your seat for at least thir­ty min­utes.

QUALITATIVE SECTION

Hon­est­ly, I don’t have much to say about this sec­tion of the GRE except prac­tice, prac­tice, prac­tice writ­ing essays. And though you don’t real­ly know what ter­mi­nol­o­gy you will see, spend time learn­ing new vocab­u­lary.  I did not study this sec­tion at all because writ­ing is some­thing that comes nat­ur­al to me, and since I read a lot of com­plex mate­r­i­al reg­u­lar­ly, I kind of zoomed right through.  The math sec­tion, how­ev­er, is a dif­fer­ent sto­ry!

QUANTITATIVE SECTION 

Con­trary to the results of my first test, I am a freak­ing num­bers girl.  I gave myself a week to study the first time and boy did it show!  The math is not dif­fi­cult at all.  It’s kind of adorable.  It real­ly is a com­bi­na­tion of Alge­bra, Geom­e­try and Data Analy­sis.  BUT the hard part is the time you have to answer each ques­tion.  There are two sec­tions and each sec­tion has about 25 ques­tions and 30 or so min­utes to com­plete.  That’s not a lot of time!

10 Things to know

1.  You have about 1 minute to answer each math prob­lem, which kind of sucks.  I would rec­om­mend spend­ing a cou­ple of hours per day for at least 3–6 months review­ing Alge­bra, Geom­e­try and Data Analy­sis.  I would also prac­tice find­ing solu­tions in under a minute.  And my biggest advice would be to review the types of prob­lems you will encounter.  I can­not empha­size this enough.  Find short­cuts, and get real­ly good with look­ing at a prob­lem and pick­ing quick­ly the LCM or eas­i­er expo­nents and roots to work with.  There’s no shame in that.  The key for the GRE is to get the right answer and to do so quick­ly.  I find math very inter­est­ing and have actu­al­ly kept up with my quan­ti­ta­tive skills since then.  I rou­tine­ly review prob­lems and try to solve them just to keep this side of my brain sharp.  On test day, how­ev­er, it is all about get­ting the right answers quick­ly. Get inti­mate with math prob­lems post your exam, if you wish to.  Your one goal for the GRE is to score as high as pos­si­ble.  So tricks, short­cuts and speed­i­ness are absolute­ly nec­es­sary.

2.  There are sev­er­al ques­tions about quan­ti­ta­tive com­par­isons.  You should def­i­nite­ly know this in advance, oth­er­wise you’re going to sit there and won­der what the heck is going on.  Time is off the essence!

3.  Prac­tice using a lame sim­ple cal­cu­la­tor.  Seri­ous­ly, you do not want to fig­ure out if you first enter the square root sym­bol and then the num­ber or vice ver­sa.  The cal­cu­la­tor pro­vid­ed for the GRE is an elec­tron­ic one and a very sim­ple one at that.  You can’t square, but you can take the square root of some­thing.  That’s as fan­cy as it gets.

4.  Prac­tice using a cal­cu­la­tor ONLINE!  It’s quite dif­fer­ent when you’re used to a hand cal­cu­la­tor.  I found it more time con­sum­ing to pull up the online cal­cu­la­tor, and end­ed up doing most of the eas­i­er ques­tions by hand.  This is why short­cuts and being able to quick­ly con­vert frac­tions to dec­i­mals comes in handy.

5.  Learn Rapid Elim­i­na­tion.  Seri­ous­ly, this is a life saver.  Trust me, you don’t have time to actu­al­ly solve the prob­lem or go through A -> D and/or check your answers.  So look­ing at answers that you know are wrong can up your chances of get­ting the right answer, espe­cial­ly if you need to guess.  For exam­ple, if fhe prob­lem includes only num­bers the answer is nev­er “D” which means there’s no solu­tion. There’s always a solu­tion even if you don’t know it. So right away you know the answer can­not be D.

6.  Study dif­fer­ent word prob­lems.  Again, these can be fig­ured out if you spend 5 min­utes on each prob­lem (I need at least that much time) but on test day, you real­ly don’t have that lux­u­ry.  I found the Dou­ble Matrix to work quite well on some ques­tions. Prac­tice quick solu­tions in advance.

7.  If you have time, try to prove your answer wrong, espe­cial­ly when it comes to quan­ti­ta­tive com­par­isons.  If it’s quick and easy, you may want to try a dif­fer­ent set of inte­gers.  Throw in some zero val­ues, if per­mit­ted and frac­tions.  For exam­ple, try plug­ging in 0.9 or a neg­a­tive (if allowed).  You’ll find you will often get a dif­fer­ent answer. So again, if you have time (which you will not), do this.

8.  Read the prob­lem care­ful­ly!  OMG, I was so annoyed when I wrote the prob­lem incor­rect­ly on the scratch paper giv­en.  I had to redo the whole thing and ain’t nobody got time for that!  Please also slow down and make sure you are answer­ing the ques­tion.  Pay atten­tion to words like X is a pos­i­tive inte­ger greater than 2. So you know it can’t be a frac­tion or dec­i­mal and it can’t be neg­a­tive or small­er than 2.  Pay atten­tion.

9. Know the fol­low­ing real­ly well (I’m reit­er­at­ing this point): con­vert­ing frac­tions to dec­i­mals (I used the lame cal­cu­la­tor pro­vid­ed, which is much faster for the not so obvi­ous prob­lems); know square roots and expo­nents real­ly well.  Know per­cent­ages and quite a bit of Geom­e­try.  Know words like quo­tient, prod­uct and medi­an.  They could eas­i­ly say divide, mul­ti­ply or find the aver­age, but the test mak­ers like games.

10.  Last­ly, here’s the kick­er: you don’t real­ly get to solve any­thing.  It’s real­ly an elim­i­na­tion game.  You’re not actu­al­ly spend­ing time solv­ing some long com­plex prob­lem. You bare­ly have time to think so where’s the fun in that?  Learn­ing and chal­lenges ought to be fun. Instead you are rush­ing, wor­ry­ing and think­ing only of the clock. At least that was my first expe­ri­ence.

Don’t do that. Relax. You are not going to die because you did­n’t rock the GRE the first time.  Make sure you plan and don’t for­get to pray. 🙂

I get the need for tests, but please don’t let it dis­cour­age you, espe­cial­ly if you’ve been out of the game. I am a “num­bers” per­son and can fig­ure any­thing out, but I need a few min­utes and I’ll get back to you with a solu­tion.  I’m sure you are the same. How­ev­er, this test can make you feel small and you’ll find your­self ques­tion­ing your intel­li­gence if you’re not care­ful. Please do not allow this to hap­pen.  It’s a freak­ing test and it does not define who you are.  You are more than capa­ble of fig­ur­ing things out. In life AND in busi­ness, no one is going to say, hey solve this on the board, now–you have 60 sec­onds.  You will encounter chal­leng­ing sce­nar­ios and you will have to use your data ana­lyt­i­cal skills, but you can often go back to your desk and fig­ure it out.  The test lit­er­al­ly gives you a lit­tle over a minute per ques­tion.  That’s just crazy and unnec­es­sary.  So in the end.  No babies are going to die if you don’t score 170 or plus.

Oh yes, the score ranges from like 130–170.  I hear it’s eas­i­er than the GMAT –I don’t’ know, you tell me.  The GRE is also accept­ed by most busi­ness schools in lieu of the GMAT, but it tends to attract those seek­ing a MS degree.  Your scores will arrive elec­tron­i­cal­ly with­in a week and to your school or des­ti­na­tion in 2–3 weeks. Oh and at the end of the test you actu­al­ly see your score. Mem­o­rize it because you can’t write it down. I hope this helps.  Good luck test tak­ers! <3  Let me know if I can help answer any ques­tions.  As always, thank you for your sup­port. Please don’t for­get to leave me a com­ment and to sub­scribe to my blog for awe­some updates I share only with my sub­scribers. 🙂