Hi Everyone,

After preparing for the test for 2 months (full time), I scored a V 156 and Q 167. Although, I had appeared for the test before in Jan 2021 and score V 147 and Q 160, and I had to pause my preparation due to some reasons, but I here I am with a 20 points improvement . Verbal could have been better, anyway!

Now, for the study materials I used. The GRE Prep Club was most important resource: heart, whether it be the support to learn some not so favourite topic or to overcome my weakness. A big shout and thanks to bb for founding such beautiful forum. Below is the detailed description of the resources.

Quants: Quants was not a big problem, but the only issues was that I made extremely silly mistakes, I knew the concept, its application. These silly mistakes included things like changing signs from one step to the next or wrong calculation. For these silly mistakes, I made sure to make use of scratch paper by writing steps and checking it twice before selecting an answer and checking it the third time once, I completed all the other questions. And the second thing was using the calculator. I knew one thing, that I am not so good with mental calculation and if ETS is offering me a calculator, why not use it. I made a habit to use calculator with the keyboard which has numbers on the right, this made things easier and quicker and efficient. As for the other resources, there are some topics such as probability, co-ordinate geometry etc., in which I usually made mistakes. Here Greenlight Test prep was really helpful. I would recommend it to everyone, who want to strengthen their base in quants, the concepts are explained in detail with the traps that ETS has for the test taker. Question and Tests on GRE prep Club, here I would recommend solving questions posted by moderators. Why? Because the are for some reliable sources, unlike some questions which are posted by members which have debatable OA. You can follow Carcass, he posts various questions everyday and they are really challenging. Apart from this, I made sure to use timed tests from various sources. Quants was pretty much it.

Verbal: This is where the problem was. Being a non-native, it was a bit difficult for me to manage verbal given the time constraints. So, I divided verbal in to three parts.
A) Reading: If this goes right, other things automatically fall in place. For this, I tried to ready 4-5 articles everyday with varying length and difficulty. Working on- https://gre.myprepclub.com/forum/gre-daily ... tml#p73407 - not only encouraged me to contribute to the club, but forced me to read the articles thoroughly, before posting them on the forum. This surely helps in RCs, but this also helped me in TC and SC. Because, if I can comprehend a sentence quickly, I can try to fill an appropriate word in the blank. So, reading is extremely important.
B) KNOW YOUR WORDS: Whatever trick you use or whatever strategy you put forward, knowing the meaning of the words worked the best for me. So, just in case, if I cannot guess a blank, I worked with the option choice keeping the theme of the question. And knowing meaning, also helps you to work quicker, rather than eliminating answer choices one by one and guessing the right answer knowing the words helps. I had a 1600+ words, wordlist. This wordlist included words from magoosh flash cards, new words I came across, GREGMAT's wordlist, barron's word list etc.
C) Formulate a strategy for each question type: This is also important for quants, but very important for verbal. As we thing that we can solve a verbal question by staring at it for 10 mins out of the given 30 mins that's a big NO. Move on. If you are confident about TC and SC first solve those and then move to RC or any other way which suits you. And if you are not able to solve a question know how to eliminate obvious wrong answers and choose the best, because you can get another answer correct confidently and because of this question, you might loose the opportunity to get it right.

Writing Task: Honestly! I did not prepare for this .

Also, I used all the powerprep tests and powerprep plus test, they were really good. Do not waste them as a diagnostic test.

Now, on to my testing experience.

I choose a center based test, because I was not very sure about my internet connection and about laptop as well. I reached the test center early and made sure to calm myself before appearing the test. Also, carry you sweatshirts/hoodies this helps you to avoid some distractions like the cooling, which bothered me the most during my previous test.

I received Q V Q V Q and for me the first quants was really easy and had questions which were a bit similar to the questions I had previously solved on the forum. The second and third quants were of equal difficulty, although not extremely difficult, but were time consuming, which made the difficult to handle during such stressful time.

As for verbal, I divided my time as 12 mins for SC/TC and 18 mins for RC, because I tried to comprehend the rc by reading it carefully. And, I am not very sure where did I make mistakes, but in the first Verbal, which was not very difficult, but on paragraph argument question took almost 2-3 mins which disturbed my time for other rc questions. The second verbal was of medium difficulty and had more short passages dues to which, I had to guess few rc questions, in order to atleast visit every question once.

Before ending the review, I would like to thank Carcass for constantly supporting/mentoring/encouraging me. GreenlightTestPrep for such well designed GRE course. And my fellow moderator rx10 for keeping a healthy competition.

I would be happy to answer your questions!

Regards
S