I was a little unsure of what to expect from the GRE as it I would be the first time I would be attempting an American standardized test. On my first official practice test, I scored:

Q - 150
V - 149

Disheartened by the results, I resolved to significantly improve and work to improve my testing skills every day to get to a 325+ level. Below are the resources I used.

1. Quant - Started with Quant practice material by the Princeton Review. While I personally found that they were good at teaching certain shortcuts, I did not feel like they were sufficiently detailed in teaching the "fundamental" skills required to do well on GRE Quant (critical analysis). Was able to get to 160Q using Princeton Review. Subsequently I used Magoosh, which I thought gave quite a few good tips on "how" to think and reason a GRE question vs just how to solve it. Also used Manhattan 5lb book for Quant (not Verbal), which I felt gave me a lot of practice on different kinds of question types and also found it to be particularly good for Quantitative Comparison.

One of the biggest tips for GRE Quant is to keep a log of your mistakes and keep re-visiting them MULTIPLE times. Don't quickly move on from your mistakes! Spend time with it to re-trace your thinking when you solved the problem. How did you "actually" go down the wrong path? Zone in on that. You will learn so MUCH from your mistakes than from the questions you always get right!

I kept a small notebook of handy formulae's to remember (you want this to be as short as possible. The trick to doing well on GRE Quant is reasoning out the problem to determine the correct answer and NOT by having a formulae for every different scenario). I used to quickly go through this before my practice and actual exams.

2. Verbal - The greatest enablers of my Verbal improvement was enhancements in my Time Management, Reasoning and (lastly) Vocabulary. It helped me greatly to have a broad idea of how much time I would spend time on Text Completion, Sentence Equivalence and Reading Comprehension (RC) sections individually. Simple note-taking (less is more!) of key points for RC passages helped me stay focused even while tackling convoluted (GRE vocabulary in action!) RC passages. Studying vocabulary is good, but it is more important to really UNDERSTAND TC/SE prompts to identify the correct answers. I would have studied 100 new words for the GRE. Resources used were Magoosh and Princeton Review.

For both Quant and Verbal, another key to success is CONSISTENCY in preparation. You'll be much better off spending a small amount of time everyday rather than spending large amounts of time preparing sporadically.

After working on improving my skills for close to 15 months, I was able to score:

Q - 167
V - 162

While, I was happy with the outcome and had achieved my targeted scores, I thought I could do better on the Verbal, so I retook the test in 3 weeks to score a 164 V (My Quant dipped to a 165 though!)

I will always be grateful to this Community for being a source of comfort and motivation through what has been a long journey. A huge thanks to GREPrepClub legends GreenlightTestPrep, Carcass and JeffTargetTestPrep for their thorough explanations and for articulating the "right" way to think and reason out the problem vs just giving the answers. Therein lies the secret to improving your GRE scores!