From Priyanshu Agarwal:

I referred the following books for the Verbal section: 1. NOVA'S GRE 2. Barron's GRE 3. The Princeton Review GRE (Especially, the DVD that accompany this book has a few techniques that might be useful for you) Apart from Big Book verbal tests, I would suggest that after the test you analyze your performance thoroughly. Mark the questions that bog you down and then practice similar questions in limited time. Further there is quite a lot of difference in the verbal tests in the book and the actual GRE test. So, also assess your performance on tests that simulate actual GRE pattern. SC questions: I would say never move to the options before understanding the sentence. There will always be few keywords within the sentence that will intimate about the fitting words in the sentence. Once you have a rough idea about the kind of words that should be filled in the blank, you move to the answer choices. Thereafter the strategy of elimination makes the task much easier. In case of two blank SC questions, first look for the appropriate words for one blank and eliminate the choices that makes the sentence illogical. Then look for the remaining choices and the other blank, and further eliminate the inappropriate choices. This way you will be left with one or two choices. Then choose out of these two ( in case two choices pass the above test) the choice that makes the sentence most logical. RC questions: What makes these questions tough is their very nature to consume time. I would suggest that you practice RC questions in limited time frames. Here are a few tips on the same: 1. Start reading the passage slowly. 2. Paraphrase in mind after reading 2-3 sentences. 3. Agree/disagree with author. 4. Take short notes

5. After reading the entire passage have an overall understanding of the passage in terms of structure. 6. As soon as you stop understanding the passage, stop and try to understand it. There certainly will be a question from this part of the passage. If you will continue reading the passage you will loose time in reading the passage and don't even understand it. This will make things difficult while answering the questions and will lead to wrong answers, thus effectively increase the time spent. 7. Keep an eye on Examples, Analogies, Simile, Metaphor and other interesting stuff. Traps 1. Answer choices that quote exact sentences from the passage are usually wrong. 2. When large information of similar type is being bombarded, don't skip it, rather understand it. There often will be a question on the same. AWA Section: The best way to handle the Issue essay is to classify the topics in 15 to 20 broad categories. Once you have made such a classification, all you need to do is to collect relevant examples and ideas related to these broader categories. Later you can tailor the information as per the issue requirement. A good book to refer for mustering information is "ACRO GRE CAT Answers to the Real Essay Questions". Argument essay, I believe, should not be much of a problem for you. However, remember that the key for AWA is Practice Practice Practice within the allotted time. This will not only boost your confidence but will also equip you with an uncanny knack to handle any issue at the spur of the moment. I hope I have shared what I have. Good Luck! Priyanshu PS: I hope the above information might to useful for other aspirants as well. So, sharing it with the group.

II. From Yamanoor Narasimha Sairam

Dear All, I am happy to inform you that I have completed my GRE exam. I scored 710 in verbal and 790 in quantitative. I had taken the GRE last year where I scored 540 in verbal and 730 in quantitative. Last time, I had no idea of how to prepare for the exams. It was just three months since I joined a new job and I was not able to balance things and eventually I messed it up. The second time, I started with revising all the wordlists. Simultaneously, I registered myself with the Test magic forums which is a forum where people discuss questions about GRE. I found this link to be extremely useful. I used to solve all the antonyms, sentence completions and analogies from these forums. This is not an extraordinary thing to do. But people bring questions which are available in the big book and other preparatory materials. They do a lot of analysis into it. It helps you to construct bridges, eliminate the choices in the antonyms and also find the magic word in the sentence completion. For Reading comprehension, try googling for the 1000 RC document. It is a good material for people who are very weak in RCs. I solved at least a 50 of them. For RCs, try using the RC utility by Lagnajeet Pradhan. This person has a lot of RCs from different materials. For Analogies, Try downloading the software by Lagnajeet Pradhan. This person has built some of the analogies himself. The software is available at e-snips. For Antonyms, you got to be strong in your wordlist preparation. Try using the link which Srihari suggested a few days ago. There is a software called Guru's wordlist. It contains quizzes of all 50 wordlists from Barrons. It helps you to remember the words. For quantitative, I used the Barrons material to recollect my basics. I solved all the questions from Novas book. It has an extensive coverage of the toughest questions meant for the GRE. But do not rely on their CAT software. It looks dumb. I would strongly recommend people to buy the Kaplans book which is 3 times costlier when compared to the other books. The 2010 edition comes with an online version of the CAT. They have a good data bank. Please try solving all those questions. It gave me the confidence to solve all the questions . They have

some quizzes being put up into your account every month called blue yellow and orange quizzes. I took them before my exams. It helped me a lot. Solve all the questions posted by students who are preparing for GRE from the orkut forum. Well, some people claim that there is a so called database of questions being posted up by students who have taken the exams. Do not trust such things and it is highly unethical of one to follow those questions. Solve those questions put up by students. You can also solve questions from test magic forums. When you are done with the wordlists at a stage, start with the big book tests. It is important that you finish all the 54 tests before your exam. They help you to strengthen yourselves in all the 4 areas of verbal. It did help me a lot. Also please solve the tests from Real 19 GRE tests. They have the toughest sentence completion questions. Exactly one month before the test, take a power prep test and identify where do you stand. You must concentrate yourselves and try to improve as much as possible. Take as many tests as possible in the last 10 days. My brother used to advise me to stop panicking about mock scores. It is 100% true. I never scored beyond 1480 in any of the tests. Take all the 5 tests in Barrons, all the 6 tests in Kaplan, Nova, Princeton review etc. Identify your weakness with every test. Leave no stone unturned. See that you have the correct journey tickets for the test. I messed it up inspite of booking 60 days in advance. Before the test day, Study little and relax more. I was able to concentrate better on the day of my exam. Stop panicking at the exam centre seeing other people glued to their books. I was chatting with a girl for more than 2 hours at the lobby before I entered the hall. This helped me a lot! In the exam, take up each question as a challenge. See that you dont waste time in antonyms analogies and sentence completion. If you don't remember a word, use process of elimination and move on. In verbal section, the questions where tougher than last time. I don't remember studying such words. However I used the POE method to eliminate choices. RCs were a pain in the neck. I got two shorter ones and one longer one. I never understood the concept of the longer one. Surprisingly, all my words were easy after the longer RC including the shorter RC which appeared back to back with the longer one.

I think I messed up with the RCs in the verbal section. I was able to finish the verbal section just in time. Quantitative section was a cake walk until I got the first data interpretation. I was careless in solving the question and wasted a lot of time there. I had 8 questions in hand with 5 minutes to go. I had my brother's mantra. Panicking would take you nowhere. I decided to solve as many questions possible and do an educated guess about the rest. Luckily, I solved all the questions, just in time!!!! Special note for people who are going to write in Bangalore: The test centre has changed from Lavelle road to Jaya Nagar 3rd block. This place is difficult to locate. You will have a board called "Jaya Nagar 3rd block" written in Kannada at a signal. You have an ICICI bank close to it. There is a road opposite to the bank. Turn left to that road after crossing the signal. You will find a board in Kannada reading 24 B cross towards the first right. Bingo, you are at the test centre. The test centre people are so stupid that they don't even keep the doors of the centre open and it is difficult to identify the centre amongst the closed shops. Screw the security if you are not able to locate the centre. Stop questioning the poor fellow about your middle names showing your passports. He has no knowledge of it. Lots of people were doing that. Usually they call your names to walk in to the test centre. Here they let you in queue. Avoid crowding the hall like you do so for Tirupati Balaji Darshan. Everybody gets a chance to walk in. Please bear in mind that there are people who take exams like PMP, USMLE Step 1. We must not dominate their entries!!! Yesterday, a pregnant woman was annoyed with GRE aspirants. This is my valuable experience. I would be glad to answer any questions you may have. III. From Omkar Raut Here is my GRE experience, links to preparation materials and some advice on preparation strategy. Hope it helps. Apologies for the length of post. Sri, you can include this post on wiki. ============ ========= ========= ========= ========= ========= ========= ===== My preparation time for GRE spanned over 3 months very irregularly, but I actually studied sincerely in the last 2 weeks only. My first attempt at GRE was back in 2007, I got meager 1110 in that. In this attempt I scored 1420, hence I strongly believe that GRE

is an easy exam and all it takes is hard work for few months and there is NO substitute for that. So here is my test experience. I took GRE on 28th October at 5pm. Few days back I came to know that they allow us to start test 1 hour before the time. So I reached prometric center of Mumbai at 3:45pm. After the usual formalities were complete, I hurriedly rushed inside. I started reading the tutorials and was instantly bored due to that nonsense. Closed every other tutorial after that. Then starts the AWA section. The issue was pretty standard. In the 45 minutes, I used 10 minutes to jot down the points. Then arranged them in decreasing order of importance and started typing it out. After finishing all paras, I double checked the introduction para and conclusion para. Then I started to eliminate spelling mistakes, man there were many. I was under wrong impression that I type pretty better than my engineering days. But I made some blatant spelling mistakes, around 5-6. So I would advise to keep 5-8 minutes specifically for checking spellings in the end. Then Argument task, again it was a standard one. You can always find minimum 3 obvious weak assumptions in the argument. For additional you really have to think about the situation presented, then you can add 1-2 more points to make the argument complete. Also dont forget to suggest points which will strengthen the argument, after all its free advise and most of us are expert in that :D. Then proceed to the conclusion. I would say one thing about argument task, it is easy to score than issue and all you have to do is dissemble a lawyer in your writing, thats it. It is measure of your criticizing skills. Then came the much dreaded VERBAL section. I solved first few questions very carefully and using every strategy I knew (elimination/ +/- connotation / roots etc.). I double checked every answer before clicking confirm. DO NOT be overconfident. Two options are always very close. In antonyms, you really have to be familiar with all words. I dont mean that you should know exact definition, rather more imp is overall familiarity with all words, their secondary meaning and connotation (i.e. what feeling this word has, +ve or -ve sense). In sentence completion, look for transitional words like although, hence etc. Practice all exercises and try to guess the word before looking at options. You need to develop this ability in sentence completion, this helps a lot. Do practice questions from any material you have (Big book/barrons) . In analogies, two things are crucial, secondary meanings and ability to find more than once relations (by forming a sentence). Most of the times one relations results in two seemingly right options, hence you have to find another relation which presents only 1 correct option which is the answer. The relations in GRE questions are always precise, for e.g. antonym, synonym, definition etc. These are all listed in the books, get familiar with each and solve examples based on them. In analogies practicing is very much fruitful. In RC, I followed a strategy to read question first and then only the part of paragraph. First line, last line is most imp in each paragraph. Elimination strategy helps a lot in RC. Practice a lot in RC, thats all I can say about it. The link to RC practice utility given below should help.

Maths section was pretty tough in the second half than I expected. Many questions were confusing and really required critical thinking, in some cases elimination was the only technique that could be used to solve the problem in 2 minutes. Also this was due to lengthy calculation. Remember one thing, if you think the calculation is complex, then it means ETS is testing something other than calculation ability, try to think about another dimension which will allow you to either guess the answer or eliminate all others. I would advise that, start revising all major concepts in algebra, geometry, statistics etc. You cant afford to miss even a single concept, even if it is advanced just do it. Start early, dont keep maths for last few days, you can do practice in those days but formulae n concepts need to be done well in advance. Then start solving problems from Nova book. This is very good book which actually matches the difficulty level of GRE Quants nowadays. GRE maths is too easy but tricky Here is a promised list of online resources and list of books I used. MATERIALS: BOOKS: Required: Barrons, Nova(only for maths), ETS maths booklet(available on GRE site) Optional: Kaplan, Princeton TESTS: Required: Powerprep, Big Book(27 tests) Optional: Kaplan, Princeton, Cambridge WORDLISTS: Required: Barrons, Some knowledge of word roots which you will eventually acquire when you complete Barrons (there is also separate section in Barrons for roots at the end of book), otherwise pick Norman Lewis and start reading casually, dont read everything keep goal of only familiarity with roots n prefix/suffix Optional: Kaplan, Princeton ONLINE: Tutorials and questions: www.number2.com Browser based flashcards: www.quizlet.com just create a profile and search for GRE or barrons. Great site!

A site based on quizlet.com API http://www.cardcram.com/ Maths : http://www.onlinema thlearning.com/ good explanation for variety of topics RC practice utility: http://www.codecoax.com/grerc/ great efforts! Another good source for online flashcards: http://gredic.com/ Listing of good materials available: http://amby.com/GRE/ Roots : http://www.betteren dings.org/ homeschool/ words/root% 20words.htm While doing roots it is very essential to relate them to know and unknown words, that way you remember them. Vocabulary quiz : http://www.freerice.com/index. php Wordlists: http://www.greword. com/ scroll down and see the left panel, there is list Free barrons list for Java phones(almost all sony phones which have USB connectivity and most Nokia phones) : http://www.getjar.com/mobile/28483/gre- guru/ Another mobile list with 4800 words: http://www.getjar.com/mobile/ 15426/barron-4800flash-cards/ Wordy2 mobile software: http://www.getjar.com/mobile/9269/wordy2/ Advise for preparation strategy: Finish off with barrons words as soon as possible and then keep on revising. Mark the words which you dont recall and then do only those. REPETITIVE REVISION helps a lot! Dont rely on your brain, it has a lot more stuff to store than these tough words, so keep revising thy list You may also use the above mentioned mobile softwares for reading words, I used it for some time. Then give 1 powerprep test, see which question types were difficult for you, do more practice on them. Specifically check if you lag behind in vocabulary, if that is the case, give 10 days for focused study on words again. Check maths SILLY mistakes, remember them and dont repeat again. Check if you missed any maths concept. Type full essay dont be lazy, you will know how much practice you need after comparing your essay with the sample given in powerprep test. Start with big book, solve each and every test. You can also solve one type of questions from all tests (e.g. antonym) then pick another type and solve all questions of that type

and so on This will give you indication of which question types are difficult for you. Dont do maths from big book, there is Nova book for maths. Now, start with remaining powerprep test, try to get first 10 questions correct. At this stage you should be confident of your score range in actual GRE. Powerprep scores are very close to your actual GRE marks. Optionally if you like to solve hard tests, do Kaplan. Otherwise solve few Princeton tests. Keep one powereprep test for last week. If you get less marks than your expectation in this test, you need a more focused study in that week. Do it with full concentration, sincere study in last week is more fruitful than just revising occasionally. Do it even if you are getting 1600 in powerprep!

And finally, ALL THE BEST to all who will be taking GRE! Dont be nervous by peer comments about how difficult GRE is, just believe in your efforts and continue consistent study. I am sure you will succeed in getting that dream score if you work sincerely.

Omkar Raut.