Hey guys,

So I took the GRE at home version this weekend after about 1.5 weeks of preparation and it did not go well.

There were tons of glitches and major interruptions. Something that everyone will have to embrace in this format I guess. The following are my recommendations if anyone is planning to take the GRE at home or GMAT at home version.

1. Get mozilla firefox asap. Google chrome doesn't work with ProctorU very well. They have to run their own extension on the browser and it gives you a lot of trouble. For instance, I had a monitor hooked upto my personal laptop and an external Logitech camera. Google kept trying to connect to my laptop webcam and not my external webcam. This involved an hour of trouble shooting by their technician and one guy almost said that I dont have appropriate equipment for the exam. I showed him that my external webcam works just fine on Skype and then after almost an hour of delibration and installing firefox, they got the exam started. I was already tired by that time.

2. Do not underestimate GRE nor the marathon of an exam that it is. It is long and fatigue gets you by the end of the exam. I had a migraine and could barely keep my eyes open. The whole ordeal took me 6.5 hrs in place of 3.45 hrs. The two essay sections are very long and the experimental section is another lengthy addition to the exam.

In short, please practice with essays when you give the mocks. Only Kaplan gives you 5 sections (including experimental ones) for the mock exams and I'd recommend practicing with Kaplan exams.

3. GRE quant is very hard.

The mock exams made the GRE quant look so easy but the final exam was brutal. I'd say harder than GMAT quant. I dont know if ETS made the GRE harder for the home edition or not but the qs were nowhere near the difficulty I faced during my mock exams. I can say the same for my verbal section as well. The passages were extremely dense and long. I guess this is where GRE differs from GMAT in the sense that its not adaptive and GRE score purely depends on how many qs you can get correct. So you dont benefit from getting a harder section in the exam.

My scores leading upto the exams were;

1. 322 (Q162-V160)
2. 326 (Q166-V 160) and
3. 326 (Q166- V160).

But my final exam score was 311 (Q159 and V 152). I believe that the technical difficulties def played a role in hampering my score. I underperformed by a huge margin.

Contrary to the feelings of most people on this forum regarding taking the exam from home, I think I prefer the exam center experience over home anyday. It's also very distracting when the proctors try to chat with you during the exam and ask you to constantly remain in the camera at all times.

Concluding remarks:

Make sure that you are prepared for the ponderous, interminable and protracted version of the GRE exam, especially if you have been studying for GMAT and making the switch just to take advantage of the at home version and meet your deadlines. If you can wait this Covid-19 crisis out and go write it in the test centers then please do so. I'd still recommend the shorter GMAT version over this long test anyday.
Download firefox and be ready.
Finally, practice all the sections of the GRE in your mock exams, including the two essays and do not skip any sections.

Hope my debrief helps you and you dont make the same mistakes I made. Good luck with your exams and I hope everyone stays safe!