Hey All,

I wrote the GRE way back in January this year and scored 336 (167Q, 169V, 4.5 AWA).
This is my debrief.
Before I begin, I'd like to share some of the wisdom I gleaned from my preparation. There are certain
things that you need to know about the GRE in order to do well on it. They are:
1. The GRE is a standardized test. The most important takeaway from the word "standardized" is
that there are no way you can "trick" or "hack" or "fool" the system. The ETS OG talks about how the
GRE measures "skills that have been acquired over a long period of time." This means that to a
large extent, your scores have already been determined, and no amount of cramming in the span of
a few months can make a significant difference to it.
So, this is lesson 1 that I learned: Spend, at the most, 250 hours of your time preparing for the GRE.
After 250 hours of preparation, the scores you get will not change by more than 1 point up or down,
no matter how much you prepare beyond 250 hours. (Assuming that you make no silly mistakes)
The best thing to do would be to accept whatever scores you get and focus on other parts of your
application.
Note: There are cases where test takers score significantly higher or lower on their second attempt.
This variation is mainly due to "silly" mistakes, and not due to some vastly improved or diminished
skill set. The 250 hours of preparation are needed so that you make sure you avoid silly mistakes,
not because you are going to improve drastically.
2. Again, I must emphasize that the GRE is a standardized test. This means that the questions are
designed with extreme care, after extensive research and testing on hundreds of thousands of test
takers (Research and experimental sections, remember?). The ETS literally spends thousands of
dollars every year on designing new questions. No preparation company, be it Manhattan, Kaplan,
Magoosh or Princeton can mimic the style and level of the questions on the GRE accurately.
Because:
a) They don't have access to data from hundreds of thousands of test takers like the ETS does. And
b) They can't afford to spend that kind of money on researching and creating questions.
What does this mean for you?
All the mock tests and practice questions you do (apart from official ETS material) are, at best,
approximations, and mostly poor ones at that, of the questions that actually appear on the GRE. Be
wary, for its very likely that you'll end up spending a lot of time practicing questions that will be, in
subtle yet important ways, different from the GRE. This kind of practice will do your score no good,
and can in fact hurt your scores. That being said, Manhattan Prep questions are, by popular
consensus, the closest in nature to GRE questions.
So this is lesson 2: Be smart and very careful in what material you choose to practice. Bad material
will just waste a lot of your time, and sometimes, even do you great harm by conditioning you to
think in certain directions that will prove disastrous when applied on the GRE.
3. Here's the deal about vocabulary: The old GRE used to test how many words you knew. The
current GRE tests how well you know a much smaller set of words. The key to doing well in the
vocabulary questions is NOT remembering as many words as you can, but to know, for each word
a) Secondary, less popular meanings and usage.
b) The subtle differences between words (Example: Exhaust/enervate)
c) The context, convention and circumstance of usage.
This is my advice: Chuck all the 3000/5000 wordlists out of the window, and learn only the words in
the Magoosh vocabulary builder app (about a thousand words). Create a list of those words
on vocabulary.com and do the challenge that the website creates for you based on these 1000
words. I did the exercises five times over. By the time I had done it thrice, I was able to run through
the entire set of 1000 words in less than an hour with an accuracy of more than 99%. ALL the words
that I got on the GRE were from the Magoosh wordlist, and better still, most of them were from the
basic level. A few from moderate, and none from advanced. What was tested was how well and
how thoroughly I knew those words. This does NOT mean that you need to spend less time on
verbal. If anything, verbal got a whole lot tougher, but thankfully, theres a sane way to prepare for it
and do well. And oh, the Magoosh vocabulary e-book is a great place to start.
4. And so, to sum it up, you CANNOT improve your skill set significantly just by preparing for a few
months. So, during the preparation phase, you should concentrate on maximising your score by
working on things that can be changed by practice. These are:
a) Your tendency to commit silly mistakes.
b) Plugging in gaps in knowledge/concepts in quant.
c) Getting physically prepared for the 4 and half hour marathon that the GRE is. Physical preparation
is just as important as mental preparation. If you dont take a lot of mock tests, youll get exhausted
by the time the last verbal section arrives, and youll do a disservice to your score.
This is how I prepared for the GRE:
I decided that Id write the GRE in the winter of 2014/15 sometime in August 2014, and in the
months that followed, I did a lot of reading up on what it tests and strategies for preparing for it. I
actually prepared for the test for a total of only about 17 days (very intensively, 10-12 hours a day).
Also, Ive had a reading habit since a young age, and so I was not as uncomfortable with the verbal
section as most other people. The order in which I prepared was pretty random and haphazard. But
in retrospect, it seems to be a pretty optimal way to prepare for the test. So here goes:
1. I got the ETS official guide and finished it cover to cover. This took 2 days.
2. First thing on the third day, I took out the CD from the official guide and did first of the two mock
tests, to see where I stood. I scored 332 (169Q, 163V). Big confidence boost. I also started doing the
Magoosh vocabulary builder app whenever I wanted a break.
3. Then, I bought the Manhattan 5lb book. From days 4-9, very meticulously, I completed ALL the
quant questions in the book (about 30 chapters and 1000 questions). I marked ALL the questions I
got wrong for review on the day before the exam. Every time I made a mistake, I rejoiced a little, for
that was one mistake less that I would commit on the actual GRE.
4. Then, I bought Manhattan Preps GRE test series for about 2k. There were 6 tests, with detailed
solutions to all the questions, analysis of weak and strong areas, and suggestions for improvement.
It was great! I had booked the 8:00AM-12:30PM slot for the GRE, so from days 10-15, I wrote the six
mock test, one each day, during the exact same time. And I also wrote the two essays in each test,
even though they would not be graded. Why? Stamina. The test analysis took up the rest of the day
on each of the six days. It was slow, but it was worth it. In all the tests, I scored between 324 and
328. Each mistake I made gladdened me a little bit more. But all the while, I was conscious that
these were not actual GRE questions, they were just approximations. So every time I made a
mistake in verbal and could not digest the explanation provided, I just moved on without too much of
a fuss. For quant though, I made sure I understood everything.
5. On day 16, I took the second and final ETS mock test I had from the CD. I scored 331. After 2
weeks of prep, my score had, in fact, decreased by a point. But I knew that I was not a peak mental
alertness when I took the test, and so I still had hopes of scoring more than 335. Then, I reviewed all
the questions I had gotten wrong during the course of my preparation, and consciously devised
strategies to avoid them.
6. On day 17, I read around 20 sample essays for the AWA section, and also ran through the entire
list of essay topics that the ETS provides. There were one or two essay prompts which I really had
no idea about, so I specifically prepared for them. I also ran through the Magoosh wordlist, one last
time. All this I did before 5:00 PM.
When I started preparing for the GRE, a senior who had just written the GRE told me this:
The right answer is not what you think is right or what is really right, it is what the ETS thinks is right
This, of course, is a bit of an exaggeration, but you really do need to tune into the frequency of the
ETS question setters. Most of my practice in the preceding days had been from Manhattan Preps
questions, and so, I was a bit off-frequency from the ETS. So, as a last exercise before the GRE, I
took the ETS official verbal guide, and solved all the 150 questions in it. I looked at each question
from the question setters point of view, and tried to find out what exactly they were testing when
they set that particular question. More than anything else, it was an exercise in psychology, and it
paid off handsomely. This is the biggest reason my verbal score jumped from 162-164 in the mocks,
to 169 in the actual GRE. At 10 PM, I slept.
Note: Throughout my preparation, I worked on Vocabulary every time I took a break and also read
random posts from the Magoosh GRE blog. Over the course of two weeks, I was able to complete
the wordlist 4 times over. I also faced some difficulty in RCs. One resource that I really found helpful
is the Sparknotes GRE ebook (availiable on their website, free). While the strategies mentioned
were for the old GRE, I found them applicable to RCs in the new GRE as well.
DAY 18: The GRE
I got to the test centre at 7:30 AM. Ate breakfast. Entered the centre at 8. Everything went smoothly
and I started the test at 8:30. Only when the quantitatvie section started did I realize that I was
slightly underprepared for quant, and so I double-checked all my answers. This cost me time, and I
had to guess the last question on both quant sections, which is where I lost my quant marks. During
the 10 minutes break, I ate a bar of snickers, a banana and drank a cup of cold coffee. (These
seemingly little things are very important. When you take the GRE, you are like an Olympic athlete,
and you must plan and execute everything down to the last detail, like them) The verbal sections
went off fine. When I was writing the test, I felt pretty numb to emotions or excitement. After four
emotionless hours, I was done. When I clicked report scores, I didnt even have the energy to
expect a score. 336 showed up. And I was a happy man.
I dont know if anybody would really bother to read a debrief this long, but I enjoyed writing this
anyway, and I really believe it will help everyone who is planning to take the test.
Thanks for reading!