Studying for the GRE

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Studying for the GRE was exhausting, it dominated my life for the last 10 weeks and it’s all over now. I took the GRE on September 27th. 

Ten weeks ago, I made the decision to take the GRE on September 27th. At the time, ETS (the exam administrator) had at-home GRE sign-ups until September 30th. Originally, I had planned and hoped to study for two and a half months between September and November. I didn’t want to start studying in August because I had a short vacation and I wanted to start with school’s second semester. However, because there was no indication that ETS would extend the at-home testing, and I needed a minimum of two months to study, I decided to book it, giving me slightly more than two months. 95% of the schools I’m applying to required it. 

First, I did research on the best study materials. I settled on MaGoosh, since they offered the best price and had a surfeit of good reviews. I found two YouTube channels: GregMatt and the Tested Tutor that were extremely helpful. I also downloaded the Manhattan 5 pound book, the Manhattan 8 book set, the ETS Official Guide and the ETS Official Verbal/Quantitative books. Before I started studying I took a practice test and scored a 150 on quantitative and 152 on verbal, which is around the 50th percentile. I was pleasantly surprised because I hadn’t done math since freshman year of college, ten years ago. My goal was to get a 160 in each section (out of 170) as that was above the average needed for each of the schools I am applying to. For Harvard the accepted average is a 159 quant and a 157 verbal, for the school of architecture.  

My Study Schedule

The first two weeks I used Magoosh and went through all their math courses. I needed to relearn everything. I remembered Pythagorean theorem and basic arithmetic and algebra, but aside from that it was like starting over. There were seven categories total and I allocated two days to learn and practice each one.

After learning the material in the Magoosh videos I used the Manhattan 8 book set to practice it. For example, over two days I’d watch all the Magoosh videos dealing with percents, fractions and decimals and then use that specific Manhattan book to practice. Over the course of those first two weeks I spent 77.5 hours relearning how to do math. At the same time I was learning 15 GRE vocabulary words a day. Magoosh has a fantastic app that consists of 1,000 of the most used words, so everyday I would write down 15 of them in my phone’s notepad while I was at school. When I returned home, I wrote them in a notebook with two synonyms and their definitions, and then wrote a short story using those 15 words. I realized during this process that I don’t learn well with flash cards. I needed to be able to visualize them, so writing them down helped.

After I went through all the Magoosh videos, I spent the next month doing all the quantitative practice in the Manhattan 5 pound book. There were around 30 sections, so each day I focused on a section and in the evenings focused on learning more vocabulary. I took two more practice tests during that time and my score slightly improved in each.  I also used the GregMatt YouTube channel and the Magoosh verbal videos to help me prepare for the verbal section.

The following three weeks I went through the three ETS books and continued learning vocabulary. A week and a half before the exam I stopped learning new words and started reviewing them. I went through 5 lists a day, wrote down the words I didn’t know and tried to remember them. GregMatt’s YouTube Chanel also has 28/30 question vocabulary quizzes that helped me tremendously in reviewing.

A week before my exam, I took my final practice test, I scored a 159 on the verbal and a 158 on the quant. I felt as though quantitative could go either way depending on the types of questions on the actual exam. I struggled with probability, so if there were difficult probability questions, that would have been bad. The final week, I lowered the amount of hours studying to around two hours a day. I practiced only one verbal and one quantitative section, while continuing to review vocabulary and on the day before the exam I did very little studying and only some light reviewing.

The Results

In the end, I studied around 272.5 hours over 10 weeks, averaging 3.8 hours a day and it paid off! I scored a 161 (75th percentile) on the quantitative section and a 159 (82nd percentile) on verbal. It’s the 320 I was aiming to get and even slightly better because I did better in quant!  I got a 5 on the writing sections (92nd percentile), but nobody seems to care about it. Ironically, my scores aren’t that important either because 98% of the schools have now waived the GRE from the application process due to Covid. Two months ago, I knew it was a possibility it could happen because some schools had started doing it, but at the time, I couldn’t take the risk of not signing up for and taking the exam. Overall I’m extremely happy with how I did and even if I don’t need it to apply, I proved to myself that I was capable of doing well. In the past I was against taking it because I hadn’t done math in years and didn’t want to learn hundreds of vocabulary words. I thought it wouldn’t be an honest representation of my ability to perform well in graduate school.

My 5 practice tests:

	Verbal	Quantitative
1	152	150
2	155	152
3	157	152
4	155	156
5	159	158