GRE, I believe, is one of the easiest exams to get through - easier compared to what we have here in India. The mantra is to mug up everything and then practice, practice and practice.

Almost all universities in North America require applying candidates to write GRE as a qualifying requirement for their graduate courses. You can write the exam anytime in the year, and once in a calendar month. Yeah, that’s right, if you do not score well in your first attempt, you can always write it again next month (which may be starting the next day). This is the reason that it’s always wise to book the exam date in the end of the month. So, if you screw up, you can write the exam again soon in the next month.

GRE is basically aimed at testing your verbal skills (basically vocabulary and reading skills), your writing skills, and your basic, very basic mathematics skills. Here is how the exam is organized:

1. Analytical Writing Section
2. Verbal Section*
3. Quantitative Section*

*Section 2 and 3 may appear in any order during the examination.

The most difficult one of these three is the Verbal Section. This section gains importance because this is the only section for which you really have to prepare. For quantitative section, primary school mathematics is good enough. One needs to prepare for the analytical writing section but the preparation comprises of just reading lots and lots of sample essays from a book commonly known as Arco.

The first and the foremost thing you need to do while preparing for GRE is to get a book called Barons and mug-up its 4000 words long word list. This is the list from where most (99%) of the words come in the exam. Now the question comes - how to mug-up such a long word list?? What I did was a technique called Rote learning. This is one of the simplest forms of learning and the most widely used. Basically I crammed up the whole list. Well, if you can make a mind map for each of the 4000 words you read there, you can easily avoid rattafying. I could do that for only few of the words by relating them to something else but rest of the words were all mugging up. You can very well use the example sentences to learn the words. If you read them properly, you can always get an idea about what the word could mean. Reading from the book may, and believe me, will become pretty boring after some time. There are lots of softwares to help you out with your preparation. I used one called Vocaboly. You can download it from net and then either buy it or make it fully functional whatever way. Audio recordings of the complete word list are also available on net. Listening to them over and over again may help you mugging it up well (it actually does help a lot!).

Verbal Section comprises of 4 types of questions - Antonyms, Analogies, Sentence Completion, and Reading Comprehension. This section has 30 questions, to be done in 30 minutes only. Seems quite enough for verbal type of questions, doesn’t it? But the problem is that some of the questions in this section take a lot of the time. These are the reading comprehensions. Each paper consists of 2 - 4 reading comprehensions (usually 3), atleast one of which is quite long and really boring. So, if you are barely able to complete the section within the 30 minutes deadline, you’ve won half the battle! The details about the type of questions mentioned here can be found in various books that I have referred to below.

After you have crammed up the word list by heart, you need to practice. ‘The Princeton Review - Verbal Ability’ is the best book to start with for practice. There are various key facts and tricks to solve the questions well and score higher. I would say that after doing the wordlist, the first thing one should do is to read these tricks carefully and then attempt the exercises of ‘The Princeton Review’ and ‘Barons.’ The techniques of Princeton are much better than that of Baron, so, I’ll advise reading Princeton (not Barons) for that. But for practice, find whatever exercises you can – be it Braons, Princeton or any other resource.

Quantitative section is nothing but 6th standard mathematics. Pythagoras theorem, adjacent angles, corresponding angles - this is all what is there in the test. It’s not tough at all to score 800/800 in this section. Just go through various conversion constants once like Mile - km, Pound - kg etc. Note: I keep on hearing that they are trying to increase the difficulty level of the quantitative section, so, it might help preparing a bit more for this section. You might want to read up stuff on standard deviation etc.

Analytical writing section consists of two writing tasks - first is writing an essay about an issue (45 min) and the second is to give an argument favoring or rejecting a decision based on the given situation (30 min). Three choices are provided for the first task i.e. essay writing and the examinee has to choose one of the three to write about. Mind it - the clock ticks while you are deciding which of the issues to pick, so, make it fast. The only preparation that is required for this section, provided the examinee is averse with basic grammar rules of writing, is reading lots and lots of sample essays. The issues that are asked are from an official pool of issues provided by ETS, the organization conducting GRE. A book called Arco contains sample essays for most of these issues. Once a student has read all of these essays, he has a pretty good idea of what is to be written in the essay. While you are reading these essays, prepare a basic structure of how the essay should look like – the beginning, the flow, and the closing. Transition between paragraphs should be smooth and you should provide lots and lots of real-life examples.

NOTE: Do not quote any Indian (Local) examples in your essays. Do not write ‘Sachin Tendulkar’ when you can replace it with ‘David Beckham’ or ‘Andre Agassi’. Read up something about Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Dali, Picasso, Ralph etc. Don’t worry, you’ll find enough about all of them in Arco. The graders are not Indians and have no idea who Sachin Tendulkar (or Cricket for that matter) is. So, try to give examples which the graders might actually know about.

The second task i.e. argument is easy to write and the techniques can be read from the Arco book only.

The final thing to do is to practice with time bounds. You need to write a lot of mock tests in order to gauge your performance and fine tune it accordingly. ETS provides a software called Powerprep which contains two mock tests. Save these tests for the right time. Barons contians 6 paper tests. Princeton review provides with 4 tests on CD and 2 online. Cambridge provides 4 mock tests. Kaplan also provides a few mock tests. Once you are over with the word lists and some amount of practice, start writing tests to gauge your performance. Start with Barons’s paper test. Note: Simulate a test centre like environment while you are writing the mock test. As far as possible, write the mock test at that time of the day when you are planning to write the real test. In my case, it was 9:00 in the morning, so, but I could never start it before 10:30. Do make a habit to wake up early (at least for a few days) if you are planning to not sleep in between the 4 hrs of test. Write the first ETS test with more than 20-25 days remaining for the exam. See your performance and then continue giving other tests. With one week left for the main test, write the second ETS mock test. In case the results do not come out well in any one of the tests, do not worry. Sometimes, it’s just not your day. But, if you are not performing well in any of the tests, do think seriously about postponing the test appointment. The preparation for essay writing can go alongside at this time (after the practice thing is over).

Ashish Virmani