How to prepare for the new GRE?

[Angelman]

Hi, all )) Gonna take my first GRE in Sep' 11 . Any advice how to begin my preparation??? (not a native speaker, sorry for any mistakes)

[London-Tokyo]

Hi, all )) Gonna take my first GRE in Sep' 11 . Any advice how to begin my preparation??? (not a native speaker, sorry for any mistakes)

Took the "Old" GRE, so may not be too helpful...

But, there are a few things I would stress and emphasize over and over again...

(I'm currently a Senior in Undergrad--Heading to UK for postgrad..)

*Vocab--(Buy a 1000 Essential GRE Vocab. or similar product...Start Memorizing ASAP)

*Self-Timing (A large aspect of your Essay, Math, Verbal...Is being able to understand how much time you have, correctly use the timing, to score the highest possible number of points...)

*Practice tests (Working over previous exams...well in your case maybe not....but generally gives you an idea of what your up against, and practice does make perfect...although over-conf. is bad..)

Thins I would not recommend...

*GRE Help Books (Princeton/Kaplan...etc., really just a bunch of advice that you prob. should understand since you prob. took the SATs or even if you took IB/A-Level, test-taking strategy...waste of time reading these books..)

*GRE Prep Classes---(Again, at least for me, the guidance was much less helpful than the above 3...)

Math is not extremely difficult, which is why if you can understand logically, and do semi-advanced math, you should be fine...

Vocab, especially for nonnative---would be difficult.

[1CoriDeHumo]

I just took the GRE on January for the 2nd time. I am also not a native speaker. I am a Fulbright candidate (a U.S. department scholarship) and the other candidates were very competitive, so we were forced to do good...

Are you taking the paper or the computer version? First time I wrote in paper. They are waaaay too different!

But basically: start studying ASAP! I studied for 6 weeks every day, around 6 to 8 hours. But I had friends who started 3 months ahead studying 3 hours/day because they worked during the day.

Being a non-native speaker I recommend you to learn as many words as you can, you would proly only get a couple in the test and people think it's not a smart move but in my case I feel that it did make a difference! Your brain is more receptive to the meaning of other words. Do as much practice as you can. But focus in the ETS Official Guide book. I did check the Barrons and the Kaplan and they are not that effective (in my opinion) and they are also quite expensive in my country, so at the end I only studied using that one and got a decent score.

DO practice using a timer! This is basic. For instance in math you will get 30 exercises to work in 30 minutes, meaning you have 1 min per question and in verbal you will get 38 questions / 30 min (1.3 quest/min) and data indicate that most test takers get higher scores if they FINISH the test. So your main objective should be finishing the whole thing! They also mention that there is a chance that guessing at the end of the test can lower your score. So, the best strategy is to pace yourself. I insist, do practice using a timer!!! If you are taking the paper version, don't forget to bring a watch on the test date, it did help me to keep track of time.

The essays I left them for last.. I did try doing few examples, but I just scored a 3.5 so I'm probably not good recommending any tip.

Good luck!

[Angelman]

Thank u, London-Tokyo, a lot for your advice Being nonnative is very difficult to me to understand GRE's texts of verbal part, cos my vocab I think is too bad yet (( Having a Barron’s 3500 list of words doesn’t make my study way a lil bit easy, cos it’s so difficult to remember 25 words (3500:140days=25) each day.

[Angelman]

Thanks, 1CoriDeHumo, for your kindly advice . Gonna take a new format of GRE -Computer based revised GRE- where a lot of reading comprehension and critical reading questions, but not worrying about Quantitative part )) Sometimes I’m so indolent and it distracts me being motivated What is your scores for Q, V & AWA?