Well congratulations on messing it up the first time. If you are reading this further, it means you are willing to move on, push yourself and strive hard for a better score next time. Let’s be honest about it, GRE is not a formula centric test or for that matter a traditional calculations intensive test. GRE is a test of Reasoning. The very purpose of GRE is to filter out candidates from the hordes of applications based on their reasoning ability. Whether GRE does a fair job at assessing reasoning skills or not is a conversation for a lousy weekend. For now, let’s focus on how to get the best score possible based on your ability.
First things first, if you have just taken the test and feel the need to take it again: you need to sit down, turn off any distractions possible and revisit the test day. It’s really important for you to understand what went wrong in the test. Was it anxiety? Was it that you spent more time on a single question and couldn’t manage time later? Whatever it is, jot it down. Not for anyone else, but for yourself so as to understand your weakness and take as much as possible care next time. Below is a checklist for a much improved retake:
Take a break, yes, I mean it. Even for a day or two. But, be totally OFF GRE. It’s much needed and makes a huge difference.
In 2 weeks you should get your GRE diagnostic results. Constantly keep on checking your ETS account for the diagnostic report. Follow the instructions in video which is linked below for extracting and analyzing the best possible information from your GRE diagnostic report.
GRE Anannt Diagnostic Analysis
Generate your GRE Diagnostic analysis here: GRE Diagnostic
Understand your error pattern and MTF (mean time of failure). Scoring better in GRE is all about being a good test-taker. You may have a long way to go but luckily for you, structured practice is sure to deliver drastic improvement!
Work on your strengths and make them stronger.
You are not taking GRE to impress anyone, so if you are bad at a particular topic and it’s not very important in GRE- leave it. You have to be more structured and organized in your next test.
Shoot your doubts at [email protected], we will be happy to help you nail GRE this time!
P.S: don’t forget to attach your diagnostic analysis link ☺
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“Our greatest glory is not in never failing but in rising every time we fail.”- Confucius[/perfectpullquote]
Every successful person has a story to tell. The essence of which usually revolves around sheer determination, the resolve to thrive, and an iron will to win.
They have conquered obstacles, won mind battles and obliterated negativity.
When you start taking your GRE mock tests, there will be times when your score will be below your expectations. But the mantra here is: “It’s not about how many times you’ve failed; it’s about how quickly you get up”.
But all the greats have one thing in common – they never quit.
That I think is the essence of a winning mindset. I’ve put together a few tips that will help you in your quest of seeking that unparalled GRE score.
1) Plan:
This is the most crucial step in getting you closer to your goal. Plan your time of study; plan your duration of study. Make a study schedule for every weekday.
It is more often in long term plans we loose focus/track: cut it down, make it simple and attainable. Plan for a day, rather an hour, and track your progress.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]GRE is all about “how good you are as a test-taker. ” To improve in this regard, you MUST utilize your time effectively.[/perfectpullquote]
Perhaps, you are at work and you have a project deadline ahead, and there is no way you can spend the hour you had scheduled for GRE prep. Instead utilize 5 minutes of your break time, to solve a couple of Quantitative Comparison questions. Even these quick bursts of 5-minute sessions, without pen and paper will help you in the long run.
Make a schedule – slot in time for your breaks, your dinner prep, well even your weekend nights! But stick to your plan. If your calendar calls for 45 minutes of study on a Tuesday evening, you must make it happen, come what may.
This is your blue print. Steven Covey re-iterates this in Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind. It is tedious, but this task of scheduling will give you a sense of direction and purpose. Aiming for, say solving one sectional test from the Official Guide, has tremendous value. These bite size revision times, could be finished in one sitting or even during tea breaks. However, it MUST be done by the end of the day!
2) Practice:
Even during his prime, Michael Jordan was the first to arrive for practice and the last to leave the gym. He believed hard work is the only ‘formula’ for success; not talent. Interestingly, Michael Jordan at first did not make it into his high school basketball team. He used that rejection to fuel his determination. Bad mock scores should fuel your determination and good ones should aspire you for better scores.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The more you practice, the better you become. But the key here is consistency. It is dedication to discipline. Put your head down and plough through your practice. GRE scores will always be directly proportional to your discipline: the more disciplined you are the better your score will be![/perfectpullquote]
3) Patience:
Sometimes you have to wait a little longer to realize your dream score. All the successful people have been rejected at some point in their journey. So, what if this is your 2nd GRE attempt or 3rd one? Learning from your mistakes, picking yourself up and moving on is the key and no doubt patience plays the most important role here. If you are retaking your GRE use Anannt’s one of a kind GRE Diagnostic analysis tool.
What better example to personify this statement than Thomas Alva Edison. He succeeded at refining the light bulb at the 1000th attempt! When asked about his other failed 999 attempts, he famously stated “ I didn’t fail 999 times; the light bulb is an invention of 1,000 steps.” Failure was not defeat for Edison; it was one step closer to the solution. His teachers said, “He was too stupid to learn anything.”
Your patience will specifically be tested in Reading Comprehension if Verbal is not your strong suite. Understanding the reasoning behind the answer will make the difference. Mind you: it’s a Verbal Reasoning test, you are supposed to be good at your reasoning ability and not your English language.
4) Positive Attitude:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Mind over matter. You must get into the habit of visualizing your victory. View your setbacks as stepping-stones. Always remember, “the more you sweat in the mock tests, the less will you bleed in the actual GRE”.[/perfectpullquote]
At 22, Walt Disney, ironically enough, was fired from his job with a newspaper firm, for ‘lacking creativity!’ Another anecdote from the life of Walt is that his proposed theme for Disneyland was initially rejected. He did not listen to the naysayers; instead pursued his vision and created a magical world that has been entertaining children and adults from 1955.
The visualizing technique is a tool that all athletes use. Create a physical visual of your goal like a Vision Board and create a vivid picture of your triumph in your mind. Visit these positive images often during the day.
5) Play
Make time for play. This can be in the form of a walk, a PS4 game, shooting a few hoops. The trick is to schedule it in and to stick to your ‘planned’ time frame. But you have to earn your rest time. You have to work purposefully and reward yourself with a well-earned break. I reiterate, you should achieve your goals first and then think of rewarding, not vice-versa.
6) Pray
This is not to be viewed purely in a religious context. It refers to balancing your mind. Meditate or pray to calm your mind. You can even consider this as a tool for introspection: ponder about your mistakes in the GRE mock tests, analyze your strategy and think of corrective measures. The length of this can vary from a minimum of 3 to 15 minutes.
Sitting in stillness will help your focus, give you a renewed sense of purpose, and negate your doubts. There are apps to help you with this process too.
Sometimes it takes you a bit longer to get your goal; but you will get there in the end if you persevere. As a toddler, all of us constantly fell down in our attempts to walk. The motor skills that are required for a baby to learn to walk are quite challenging; but none of us gave up in spite of constantly falling down. We all picked ourselves up and persevered!
There is no a magic formula that would promise instant success;
GRE stands for Graduate Record Exam. It is taken by students aspiring for a business school or a graduate school. Every year, more than 700,000 students appear for the exam from all over the world.
And today,you are one of them. There are hundreds of people giving you different advice and different learning strategies and it might be getting all entangled and confusing out there.When should you begin? How should you begin? Is three months a good time to prepare? Should I actually be studying for five months if I am weak in one of the sections? Or will that be too long?
All of these questions are relatable and I really appreciate that you are digging your sanity and making efforts to crack this test.
I am here to guide your way through it. Here are a few tips which will help you get a steady start for acing GRE. Of Course, it takes more than just a head start to win a race but the beginning is always the hardest. I really hope these tips motivate and guide you to start burning the midnight oil.
1.Start planning ASAP :
Champ, I don’t know you personally but as far as I can tell, you will be having a plethora of stuff going on in your life besides GRE. College, relationships, work, family, volunteering, internships, exams and what not. Nobody sets aside three months only to sit at home and study GRE. So how about you play safe and START EARLY? Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to give out a cheque of thousands of money and enroll in coaching right away, but start taking the small steps. Start researching the universities you are aiming for and their GRE cutoffs.Set yourself a target score. And let that target score inspire you to work harder each day.
Ask your friends and cousins about the good universities but don’t let their judgements cloud your opinions. You want to expand the horizons of your GRE knowledge without being biased by a third party.This is your time to tighten your nerves to get ready for a mentally challenging roller-coaster ride. We generally recommend a full on GRE focused preparation timeframe of 2-4 months based on personal strengths and weakness but how would you know which timeframe is the best for you ? Well, keep reading and you’ll know.
2. Take a practice test:
This is the most important of all and I know it sounds redundant because you are going to end up studying for GRE eventually whether you take the test or not. But don’t let that fool you. Overconfidence will brutally murder your GRE score. You might be having pristine English vocabulary and might even be an English honors graduate but GRE will hunt down your weaknesses through its unconventional format and you might end up getting a score you might have not expected in your wildest dreams. Take the FREE mock GRE test at gre.anannt.com!
Neill Seltzer, national GRE content director for the Princeton Review said “To walk into this test unprepared, to sit down [and take it] having never done it before is suicide”
You cannot risk your dream college. Take the test. Don’t sweat yourself on the score. It’s a raw score and you have to climb your way upwards by stepping on the rungs of math techniques and RC strategies.
3. Reality check :
There are different kinds of people. Some prefer studying a few minutes every day over a long stretch of time and some like it being compressed over a span of one or two months. Some join coaching classes, some don’t. Some are born to follow Shakespeare’s footsteps while still others have different talents. There is no point fretting about which is better and which is worse. Because, there is no “right” answer to that. GRE is specialised to respect the ability of students all over the globe and test them despite their financial and social standing in the society. The best way to gauge the best answer for you is to trust your instincts. If online tutoring services seems to fit your schedule the best, go with that even if you have no trail left behind for you to follow.
No one knows you better than yourself. And no one has achieved anything extraordinary by following others footsteps.
4. Practice,Practice,Practice :
Hey champ, GRE is war and practice is your weapon of attack as well as self defense. I remember, nearly a month and a half before my test date I had started studying for almost twenty hours a week. It was one hell of a gruelling timetable of revising vocabulary, solving practice tests and writing essays ( hardly 4-5, I didnt give a damn about the essays :p). It became so mind boggling that I started to have dreams about the RC questions, exponents, ratios variables, etc. I used to get up in the morning with answers to questions of the previous day and jump with joy at 5.00 am because I had finally got the shortest technique.
This might sound absurd, but it’s very normal. Yes, you are mentally fatigued and you don’t want to be thinking of GRE while sleeping but that’s the right way to go about it. Get the GRE into your blood.
The more you practice, higher the score. It is directly proportional. No exceptions!
5. Focus on your weaknesses :
You don’t have to be an English major student or a die hard fan of Robert Frost to ace the verbal GRE but it would be really lame to jump into the water without being able to tackle its currents. You might be weak in English and/or Maths and it’s okay. Everyone has weaknesses and you would realise yours too, once you take your practice tests.
So, get to sharpening those skills! Put a little extra effort in those subjects. Many universities and coaching classes offer high level English and Math classes which will help you for your GRE or rather spend your time on it, start with the fundamental concepts using the available books (Manhattan Prep guides) and then take it on next level step by step. There are plenty of crash courses as well as online tutorials available if you do not have other opportunities in your vicinity. I would recommend to use the online learning services of Anannt, as the artificially intelligent platform would make sure you are ready with the fundamentals before increasing your level. If you have started early, and have a semester or two in hand before you start preparing for GRE, then this might be a great way to make the learning of verbal and analytical section easier.
Think big- but start from the small is all I am saying.
6. Dictionary is your best friend :
Memorise the high frequency vocabulary ( you can check the list of high frequency GRE words in our “Resources” tab) like your memorised the alphabets. Make flashcards. Make songs. Make poems. Make notes. Decorate your room. Engrave the words in your veins like you plan to take them to your deathbed.
Yes, I emphasised it a little bit more than it deserves. But you get the feel, right? You really need to familiarise yourself with the basic fundamental of English- WORDS. This is the most important aspect ( there are ways to nail the Text completion with just reasoning skills- we will write soon about that 🙂 ). It will help you in the analytical as well as verbal section.
These are some of the very important tips which you should keep in mind before plunging into the books for GRE preparation. These key points, if followed with utmost dedication will definitely help you get a noteworthy score in GRE as it did for me.One last thing champ, never overstress yourself. Breathe and relax. Take a good night’s sleep. If you are not understanding a few techniques today; you might be mentally drained. Have a good time today, sleep tight and restart tomorrow with renewed vigor. It always gets better, you just need to never give up!
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