<p>I am graduating and getting my undergraduate degree in 2 year. Its my dream to get in to a top end grad school, and I know that the GRE counts a lot towards the admission decisions... Soooo this arises the question...
How long should one study for the GRE before taking it???
also what areas should be focused on the most when studying??? </p>
<p>Thanks!!!</p>
<p>I used the Princeton Review “Cracking the GRE” in my spare time over the course of a year and did very well on all GRE sections. What I most needed to do was learn all of the “most tested” vocabulary words that I didn’t know (made flash cards), review math formulas, and take practice tests. I take a dim view of standardized tests and prepping for them, but this was a necessary evil. Good luck!</p>
<p>Are you sure the GRE is very important for the grad program you want to go to? In many fields, it is not a major admissions criterion and is only used to weed out very weak candidates.</p>
<p>I don’t think you need to spend an enormous amount of time studying for it. For sure, buy some books and do practice tests so you’re familiar with the format and can brush up on things you may have forgotten, but the math is stuff you probably learned in high school. For the verbal, its reading comprehension and vocabulary. Practicing will help with the reading comprehension, but there’s nothing to really learn. As for the vocabulary, unless you plan on memorizing the dictionary, studying probably won’t make a huge difference considering they have the entire English language to choose from.</p>
<p>The answer really depends on the difference between the scores you need and the scores you can get. Take a couple of practice tests. If you are near where you want/need to be, then why study (I didn’t!)? If you are within a hundred points (old 200-800 scoring… not sure what this would be now!) then you can probably narrow the gap in a few months with the help of a book or two. If you are 200+ points away (old scoring) then start ASAP - small gaps can be fixed by relatively easy methods, but big gaps mean learning things you apparently never learned in the roughly two decades of education you already had!</p>
<p>The GRE is more expensive than the SAT, so it does pay to prepare. You only want to pay once. How much time you spend depends on you. My daughter just reviewed for a couple of weeks, but she likes to take tests.</p>
<p>dylan400mh,</p>
<p>I think 3-4 months should be enough…And what should you focus on depends on which score(verbal or quant) will be more important to the schools you will be applying to. for engineering, business accounting related subjects, quant scores matter more while for humanities type of majors, verbal scores matter more…However, your goal should be to do well on both if you ask me.the more your total score, the better your chances of getting through and receiving financial aid</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I have to disagree with this. Various sources list vocabulary words that most often appear on the GRE. The Princeton Review book that I used, way back when, had a list of 200. I went through that list, circled the words that I didn’t know, and then learned them with flash cards. When I took the GRE I kept track and EIGHT of the questions in the vocab section involved words that I had learned. I am sure that my vocab study edged my verbal score up. and it didn’t really take that much time. You can keep flash cards with you and use them any time that you’d otherwise be killing time, such as at the bus stop, in waiting rooms, etc.</p>
<p>I have been prepping for the last 3.5 months and i think that this is a good amount of time to nail the GRE. Have my GRE scheduled in the next 5 days and hopefully i should be able to post my experience here soon.</p>
<p>Please do MS2014! </p>
<p>I sort of got the ball park range of studying for 4 months on the math aspect, as well as getting a grasp of the over all format of questions.
As for english, seeing that im pursuing a graduate degree in psychology, im going to start learning the most used words a year before, just to ensure I an not in a huge rush.</p>
<p>I studied 2 weeks with the Barron’s guide and got a high enough score that I knew I would pass the adcom screen. Never thought about it again.</p>
<p>It really is up to your comfort level and capabilities. I went over a practice exam in a prep book as a diagnostic of sorts. I felt comfortable enough with my knowledge of the material to spend two or three days a week before my test date going over questions to familiarize myself with the test format (and ended up with a score I’m happy with). However, someone who’s been out of school for a while, doesn’t have strong math/verbal skills to begin with or isn’t familiar with standardized tests may want to spend longer.</p>