Hi everyone,

As I extensively used this platform during my preparation, I figured out I should at least give back something, in the form of written feedback about my GRE (and TOEFL) at home experience.

I realized I had to pass the GRE and the TOEFL on December 19th only, but I prepared quite intensively during 2 weeks. I'm applying for a PhD in Computer Science, and I already have an advanced mathematical education -- so I did not really need to prepare for the Quant part. I'm a non-native English speaker, but I have decent real-life English practice (through my studies, backpacking experiences, etc.). My mother tongue is French, which helps for the Verbal part, as many GRE-type words have Latin roots. In general, however, my vocabulary is pretty weak. I wrote my TOEFL on December 30th and my GRE on January 4th. I scored 117/120 on the TOEFL (30/30 reading, 30/30 listening, 30/30 speaking, and 27/30 writing) and 334 on the GRE (Q170, V164, AW 5.0).

During my two weeks of preparation, I used the following resources:
- To learn GRE words, I followed GREGmat's 28 videos. Usually, I was scoring 20-25/30 in these. Also, 2 or 3 days before my exam, I discovered Magoosh flashcards. Had I found it earlier, I think I would have learned the words there instead.
- In general, to practice for the whole verbal part, I did many exercises on greprepclub. I would typically go on a random page of the forum, open 10 tabs with one question in each and try them one directly after another.
- For the Quant part, I did a few exercises on greprepclub to get used to the Anglo-Saxon conventions and refresh my memory about old-school planar geometry (e.g. Thales, inscribed angles, alternate interior angles, etc.).
- I wrote both mock tests available on ETS website. I wrote the first one after 1 week of preparation (Q169, V158) and the other one 2 days before my actual exam (Q168, V164). The V164 in the second exam is dubious, as I accidentally already did some of the questions on greprepclub.
- I wrote 2 Issue essays and 2 Argument essays. I checked them on Grammarly afterward to have some "computer feedback".

On both test days, everything went similarly to what other Internet posts described. My Internet bandwidth was slightly below the minimal ProctorU requirements, but it did not impact my experience. I used an external webcam to show my surroundings without damaging my setup (it turned out the Webcam was not good enough to show the details of my passport to the proctor, so I had to send a picture to my email address). By the way, the picture of me appearing on the TOEFL report is horrible, but I guess there's nothing I can do about that.

The only technical issue I encountered was when my Webcam disconnected during the Issue essay -- the USB port was pretty loose. My proctor immediately stopped my exam, but after I fixed the problem, he had some difficulties trying to reconnect me -- meanwhile, the time was still running out! Overall I lost 10 minutes. To be fair, I think I could have scored at best 0.5 points more -- the 6/6 AW examples given by ETS seem really out of reach. Anyway, the moral of the story: double-check your hardware. Following that, the first Verbal section was extremely sophisticated. One of the reading comprehensions with 5 questions was very abstract and philosophical -- you can imagine that after losing 10 minutes for my essay and having to make random guesses on the first section, I did not feel very confident. However, the next 4 sections were much closer to what I was expecting. Given my final score, I assume the first Verbal section was the experimental one.

In the end, it took 10 days to get my TOEFL scores (with January 1st in-between) and 9 days to get the GRE's.

To conclude, I have to mention that I find it absolutely appalling that most graduate schools still require the GRE. In the fellowship I'm applying to, my GRE score is basically worth 20% of the overall grade. I can't believe that my future PhD experience is assessed by my ability not to get confused by oversophisticated inequalities on negative integers, and to learn 1000 crazy English words in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, I wish a lot of luck and courage to those reading these lines.