This is how I prepared for my GRE test. Hope it will help you!

Background

The purpose of this blog is to help those who have similar background and want to get a similar score. For those who do not, I am afraid that this blog might not be helpful. Also, please forgive me for all the mistakes I made in this blog since I’m not a pro in GRE teaching and I did not take any lesssons. Feel free to contact me via email if you have any comments.

I was born, raised, and attended a university in China. Before preparing for my GRE test, my TOEFL score was 109 (writing 26 and speaking 23). It took me about 2 to 3 months half time (actually maybe even less since I was running a lot of errands) without taking any lessons, and my GRE score was 158 for V, 170 for Q, and 4.0 for AW.

This blog is not an advertisement.

Verbal

158 in verbal is not high at all but I think it is fine since a lot of Chinese students just apply for universities with this score. It is perfectly fine if you want a better score.

To prepare for the verbal part, I think for a lot of students like me, it is very important to first prepare your vocabulary. My personal feeling is that the vocab requirement of GRE is much larger than that of TOEFL, and you must devote some serious time going through GRE vocab. There are a lot of resources for GRE vocab online and offline. A lot of them contain ~3k words and only a small part of them are what you already know. I used an app developed by these guys and I will use it as an example in below. Before I started working on vocab, I knew maybe 500 from ~3k words, and before I took the test, I knew maybe ~2k out of ~3k. The good thing about this app is that the words are in ordered decreasingly according to their frequencies in GRE tests. So even if you only learn the first 1k words, it will still be very helpful. However, the disadvantage of such design is that the last words are very hard to learn.

If you plan to learn 300 new words with this app, you might need 5 hours or more on vocab each day since in addition to learning new words, you also have to review the old ones. I was a little buzy with some issues so sometimes I really learn the new workds and review the old ones, but mostly I was unable to finish this daily assignment. Also, it is not enough to go through the words with this app only once because even with the reviews this app arranges, you still forget a lot of the new words. I went through the words twice, but in both times I left the final several hundreds of words because they are hard to learn and rare in GRE tests.

Maybe after you finish your first time with the first ~1k words, you can start working on the questions. There are two kinds of questions, fill-in-the-blanks which requires you to select the appropriate words or phrases to complete a sentence or two, and normal reading questions which are similar to TOEFL questions.

For the first type, it is still a game of vocab. If you can understand everything, which you would probably not, you can answer all questions correctly. If you cannot, you may rely on techniques, such as guessing whether a blank should be word with a positive meaning or not based on symbolic words in the question, such as however. Notice that the ~3k words I mentioned above do not cover all the words you see here so you need to spend some extra time them. I used Quizlet to make my own wordlist but I think this website is not very easy to use because it does not ship with the function to arrange reviews for you. There are a lot of resources available where you can practice the qeustions. My statistics was that for 10 questions with moderate difficulty, I took ~7min with ~70% accuracy.

For the second type, I think it is like TOEFL reading pro with some logic questions. For the TOEFL reading pro part, you just need to go through the passage and find the correct answer. In most cases, the answer is obvious and is not confusing. Just do not think too much and input your answer. However, in some cases, you may feel like all options are right or are wrong. So help you god :-). For the logic questions part, you may need to understand what is strengthening an argument or weakening an argument. Simply reiterating the same thing covered by the passage does not do anything. You should look for something beyond what is covered by the passage. Also, the length of each passage varies. 4-question passages are much longer and you tend to forget while reading. My personal recommendation is to skip them and go back in the end. For this part, my statistics for practice was ~70% to ~75% accuracy, and maybe ~1.5min to ~2min for each question. However, I did make more mistakes in 4-question passages.

My speed and accuracy both seemed OK. You have 30min for 20 questions, 10 for each type. However, I have to remind you that the variation of my accuracy is large. Sometimes I only answer 4 out of 10 questions of the first type correctly because I really do not know the words and that is definitely something you want to avoid.

Quantitative

The math education in each country is different. In China, high school math can cover GRE quantitative part. Just do some hard questions (I did 150 questions) in GRE quantitative and be careful and optimistic during your test.

AW

4.0 in AW is again not high at all but again I think it is fine since this is what a lot of my peers do. It is perfectly fine if you want a better score.

I spent maybe several hours in this part. First, you should know that there are two parts in AW, and to avoid being shocked my how little you prepared, I think you should know the order of the two parts. I didn’t, and it really surprised me. Then, you should know what you are expected to write in the two parts. For the part where you discuss a given topic, sometimes you run out of things to write. In that case, you might want to paraphrase a little/lot since you do not want your pessage to be too short. Finally, you should know that the sound of people typing with their keyboards might be a little frightening the first time you hear it. Just calm down and write your own pessage.

Report Your Score

TAKE YOUR TIME WHEN YOU ARE ABOUT TO FINISH because you could easily click on the button to give up the GRE test you just take! Read carefully when you finish and make sure to report (instead of give up) your score when you want to.