I took GRE today just after three days of my final exams and got a quite good score.

I come from China and the most challenging part of GRE is verbal. Chinese students have spent millions of hours solving math questions much harder than GRE and generally excel at quant.

However, the verbal is quite challenging for non-native speakers like me and it took me two months of preparation (on average 2 hours per day).

The first section was quant and I cracked it within 20 mins.

The second was verbal, which I found not hard and encountered 2 questions I have practiced before.

The third section was quant. It was extremely difficult and I still could not finish all questions. The descriptions of questions were lengthy and the data processing questions were daunting. Some of them required good tricks. I thought it is an experimental section since I have never met such quant questions before (I did some questions of hard sections but they are much easier).

I thought I entered the hard mode on my second verbal since they TC questions became much more difficult although I knew the meaning of words. The reading passages were slightly harder.

The final quant was a normal "hard" section and easier than the third section. Still, I was not sure about 2 questions.

The following are some tips for verbal.

First, vocabulary is always the first thing. To get a satisfactory verbal score, understanding over 90% of meanings of words appear in choices is necessary for most people unless you are very good at reading comprehension. I memorized most of the vocabulary through an app because I found reading vocab books too boring. If you found you could not continue to memorize words, do some practice problems (problems of test companies like kaplan, magoosh or princeton instead of official problems) and see how many words you know. As you keep working on vocab, you would eventually understand most words in the problems.

Second, the sentences structure of GRE are also challenging. One typical trick is inverted sentences. For example, many GRE questions put the word "however" in the middle of the sentence instead of the beginning. Try to get used to these structures when practicing.

Last, SE questions are generally easier. Typically, there are 2 pairs of synonyms and you just decide which them fits the sentence. Mastering these questions could save quite a lot of time and get scores improved easily.