Hello there,

I have been a long time lurker on the forum and i wanted to share my experience with the GRE,hoping it could help some of you.

So for context, am from Mauritius(Small island near Madagascar...look it up:P) and want to pursue my studies in the field of Business analytics with the aim of eventually using it for a social entrepreneurship project.

There are not many Mauritian studying for the GRE, the only person who i knew did the test is my brother(who by the way lives in the U.K) who did it one year before with a stellar score of Q165 and V162, so my main go to resources were this forum and Magoosh.Furthermore, there is only one GRE test per year in Mauritius, so i would have to go do the test abroad, this implied negotiating with my employer and another set of logistics.

Preparing for the GRE, i was pretty confident with my verbal skills and knew that i wouldnt need so much effort there, on the other side, the notion of the quant section itself scared me. It was not that i was very bad at Maths, just that for some reasons i was less confident in numbers than in words.

During my study, i did the practice tests( from ets (untimed test,practice 1and practice 2 in that order ) scoring above 160 in verbal each time but scoring between 158 and 160 for Quant. By this time, i felt like i was primed for the test, so i looked for a test location to which i could travel and decided to go to Singapore for its safety,ease of travel and...food of course! So i booked my Airbnb,test and ticket and i was good to go.

The test was one day after my landing, i went in the test a bit stressed. Did the necessary checks then went to tackle the beast. The AWA were overall cool(as cool as these tortuous essays can be) then came the quant section and god, was it hard. The questions were harder than i ever faced, by the end of the section i was running out of time and had to guess the last 5-6 questions.

At this point my confidence was Shot,i did my best in the verbal but for the second quant section, i was constantly telling myself that i had messed up so bad in the first section and that it was too late to have a good score...then went i thought i was over, i got a third quant section and realised that one of those was probably experimental, however,even with this knowledge i still felt like i messed up the previous sections(by the way i ran out of time in all quant sections) and it impacted my workings. At the end of the test i got the results..165V: Wonderful! 154 Quant: MEEEEEEEEEEHHHH. Those would be great score if i wanted a more humanity oriented programme but in my case this wasn't good at all.

I flew up to my country after three days(and after binging on Singaporean food), at this point i was pretty down. The worst thing about it however was knowing that i could have done better, but a combination of stress and bad time management got the better of me. After one week of my Girlfriend not understanding why i was feeling down, i decided that i wouldn't accept these scores, i had to go back and change things up. I targeted a date one month after and began working my way towards a better quant score.

I realised that i went through the test in a very dumb way:- i wasn't skipping any questions,trying to tackle all of them one by one and of course running out of time. Secondly i was letting stress and low confidence(maths wise) get the best of me: For example, even if there was a question like 2+2, i would take 30 seconds to check,double check and triple check it...just because i lacked confidence and in the end of course again ran out of time.
One week before my appointment,I downloaded the GRE practice test plus and scored 163 verbal and 158 quant. It wasn't the best score, but i was pretty satisfied as i conducted this practice test in sub optimal conditions(after work) and i managed my time quite well.

On test date(again in Singapore),i went in pretty relaxed,managed my time well by skipping questions and all,kept the stress low and at every level was reminding myself that i was prepared for this. As i finished the test,i felt satisfied and knew that i did what i could this time and it showed in the scores: Q 164 and V 162. I was so Happy that i said to my parents i wasn't sure of my score and would wait for the official report to confirm.

So, i know i write a lot, so to summarize all this:
• Believe in yourself, don't let low confidence bog you down. If you put in the effort, the results will show.
• Do check the pacing strategies available online, they can be a real game changer
• As much as you can, stick to official Material. Harder questions exist, easier questions do exist, but you want your practice questions as close as possible to the real thing.
• I personally liked the powerprep plus test from ETS as i feel that they are closer to the real thing than the other ones.
• Magooooshhhhhhhh. I really used Magoosh before my retake and used only the free materials, but should i have had more time, i definitely would have subscribe to one of their plans as i feel they do a wonderful work.
• This Forum is excellent, even as a lurker(and a bit ashamed to say so) i benefited hugely from the exchanges in the community. From the top of my Head, guys like Carcass and Sandy (and many other whom i forgot) are real heroes.
• Also a retake can be pretty draining, but it's one last push towards your dream career, bite the mouthpiece and punch!

Lastly, if you are like me and a pain to live with when you are preparing the test, take a moment to spend time with your family, friends,better-halves etc, in the end they are those that really matter,good score or bad score.

I know this wall of text must be pretty unappealing and am pretty sure it is littered with mistakes, but i hope it will help some of you still:)

Best of luck,

Hans