The GRE is a widely and globally accepted examination given by many students applying to various postgraduate courses, across many universities. Here are some tips to crack the GRE!
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Let’s dive right into the tips and tricks you need to crack the GRE
1. Pick a date–
One must book their slots for giving the examination before commencing preparation so that they can make available for themselves a fixed time slot, which helps a student greatly in the management of his or her preparation time by setting a deadline.
2. Begin studying at least 5-6 months before the due date you select-
Beginning well in advance will only help in assessing your strengths and weaknesses, which will in turn aid time management and help you be more efficient in your preparation. In addition to this, it will also help you in understanding concepts more clearly over a relaxed period of time. The availability of time will help ease the pressure and increase focus.
3. Choosing the right study material
This is an extremely crucial step, for the wrong choice of study material could land you up with unclear concepts, inadequate practice, and less time to fix these mistakes. This means that you need to make a thorough analysis of all the study material available before narrowing down on one. Weigh your options, don’t weigh your odds.
4. Create a study plan
Create an in-depth study plan by narrowing down on solid, time-based objectives within which note a list of topics you aim to cover. Setting realistic goals is an essential part of preparing your study plan. Make sure you have long term objectives as well as short term objectives, for eg. Long term- Finishing the Quant syllabus in 3 months. Short term- Finishing two units of Quant this week. Write your objectives down. Make sure to accommodate revisions and the number of breaks you will take in the study plan.
5. Have directioned preparation for quant.
GRE quant focuses on testing the reasoning ability of the student. Hence most questions are very basic in terms of logic, but always have a twist in it. Understanding these subtle nuances is often the solution to most problems.
Attempting to solve a problem with only concepts and procedure can be both confusing and time consuming. A far more efficient approach would be to figure out a pattern in the trick questions and create a strategy which can be used for them.
The GRE Quantitative Reasoning section tests your ability to interpret given data correctly rather than just your knowledge of formulae and concepts. Out of the four topics, Arithmetic is what is going to be tested pre-dominantly, accounting for approximately 40 to 50 per cent of your questions. Arithmetic tests your skills in numbers, ratios, percentages and exponents, etc.
6. AWA hacks
Analytical Writing Assessment allows schools to evaluate the writing skills of the applicant. Make sure to not underestimate this section, for showing up unprepared can suck up time and lead to inefficient answering.
Make sure your essay practice leaves you confident in structuring one in the question, practice and feedback of an expert is key here.
The essay is scored by e-rater®, a computerized program developed by ETS that is capable of identifying essay features related to writing proficiency. And a human checker, both of which through a system arrive at a score.
7. Acing verbal
Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary, are the two sections of GRE verbal.
Learn new words regularly and include it in your regular conversation. Without practice, it will be difficult to crack the verbal reasoning. RC is a time-consuming section which requires the utmost attention to find the answers in a specified time.
To reduce the reading time, employ Pareto’s Principle (also called the 80/20 principle) that is, focus on the 20 per cent of important sentences that will help you uncover the essence of the passage to answer 80 per cent of questions. For instance, you could look for words like ‘since,’ ‘therefore’, ‘because’, ‘although,’ and so on, because the main sense of the sentence is usually mentioned after these words. I hope these tips to crack the GRE exam prove to be useful for you.
All the best!
