Hi, I am Anjishnu Kumar. My score in GRE is 336 with 168 in Verbal and Quantitative reasoning sections and 5.5 in Analytical Writing. My vocabulary was weak, hence I started playing some vocab game like http://www.vocabulary.com and read Word Power Made Easy. I liked it because the gamification made it addictive, the words are always in context, and you get to learn some pretty interesting facts about etymologies. Math was comparatively easier; I had just practiced everything I would need. I made sure I wasn’t having speed issues. Mistakes in this section tend to be quite silly.

I tried to be logical in my approach to questions: cut out answers that are definitely wrong, and make a judgment call on those that remain. The exam is as much about eliminating answers as it is about picking the right one off the bat. For AWA, I practiced writing a couple of times to make sure you I did not run out of time in the actual exam. The focus is on breadth and not depth, and you do not need to produce a work of literary genius.

The following tricks worked for me in AWA section:
• Keep a set format- a 'template' in mind for both types of question.
• Spend 3-5 mins coming up with ideas and structuring without typing anything. If you come up with a new idea on the fly, you tend to immediately write it down, which leads to weak structuring.
• 15 minutes of furious writing. Around the 5 minutes left mark, finish up and start inspecting your writing.
• Spend the last 5 minutes 'finishing off', removing obvious mistakes, adding filler statements in case you've jumped from one conclusion to the next without qualifying it.

Most importantly, you may be inclined, as I originally was, to buy a lot of study materials. For quant this may be fine as the extra knowledge doesn't hurt. However, for the verbal section I used to find that other prep resources (apart from ETS) used to have different standards for the kind of leaps in logic you are allowed to make (often resulting in more spurious and/or tenuous links between statements).

So, on the last couple of days I did ONLY ETS papers and get a very clear idea of what they want from you. A friend of mine recommended this, I thought it didn't make sense at the time, but now I feel it really helped. If you have time, start reading a lot of different books. However this will make only a small difference.

Good luck!


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