How to study for the GRE for 320 + score | Online experience, study schedule, working full-time

hey guys it's dahei welcome to my Channel today I'm going to be talking about my GRE exam experience I'm going to talk about it in four parts so first I'm going to describe why I took the GRE exam in the first place and then I'm going to go through in detail my study plan and then I'm going to talk about the importance of practice exams and how many I took Etc and lastly I'll walk through the details of what the online GRE exam experience is like so I hope you stay tuned so starting off with why I took the GRE exam so I knew that I wanted to take some kind of exam to apply for MBA programs and I know that the GMAT is usually kind of what's associated with MBA programs and it used to be the only exam that was accepted for them I think a few years ago now like it's been a you know it's been some time now that they also accept the GRE exam and personally you know I study for the GMAT for quite some time and after a certain amount of time I would say like honestly like six months I still was plateauing around 6 40 6 50 and my target score was something above a 700 ideally like 720 and clearly I was not getting there so I was extremely frustrated but I was told that the GRE could be a better option for me and so I took the practice GRE and it was so much more straightforward and I ended up doing much better on the GRE so that's what I suggest obviously the GRE is like very flexible it's pretty much for all types of Master's programs so I kind of like that aspect as well you can keep it for five years you can reuse it so that's great but just speaking on my experience if you're also thinking should I take the GMAT or the GRE for specifically MBA admissions it has been my experience at most schools obviously do your research but most schools don't have a preference between either so really take the one where you feel just more natural with it it's hard to describe but just take both diagnostic exams at the beginning and then you'll get a feel for which one comes more intuitively uh to you so I'm not going to go into like the details of the GRE exam structure because you can find that online I'm going to go more into detail about how I personally studied for it so I started studying this exam in January of 2022 so about last year and I studied for a total of two and a half months I would say give yourself a good three maybe even four months to just like give yourself that comfortable amount of time I think like rushing into it and feeling that pressure of time you know with the stress and you know life life things that can happen like just give yourself a good four month buffer to prepare for this exam and feel confident that you have enough time to do your best on it so personally when I embarked on the studying journey I was like okay do I do it on my own do I get some help and in the end I decided to invest in a online course I don't think you need to do it because the content is all out there it's all in the books you know there's so many great free resources these days but personally I needed something to really like keep myself accountable for it to show up and study so I ended up doing a course with the Princeton Review I just kind of researched online and looked at a bunch of options there's like Kaplan there's I don't know what the others are called but anyways I looked at a few and I just decided to go with the Princeton Review one because it was a pretty full package where it was about eight weeks and you would have a small group tutoring session once a week for about three hours they gave you a whole bag of practice exams a huge Bank of practice questions so I just really wanted a One Stop Shop platform to help me study and stay accountable because you know especially if you're working full time and studying it can get really hard so at a certain point you have to know when to ask for help and this was definitely one of the occasions where I I needed help so essentially my study schedule was every Sunday I would have those three hour courses so it was like a small group we were maybe three to four people so very you know very small small enough that you can really get all of your questions answered and that was led by the tutors so every week we would go over specific types of problems whether it be Quant or verbal or the essay section and we would do practice questions together it was really just like a class basically and then um throughout the week I would do you know they kind of gave us homework or like suggested problems to do and that was around 10 to maybe 20 Questions a day which is really not a lot and very doable so I would do maybe a set of 10 in the morning I would do a couple at lunch and then I would do a couple in the evening and what's very very important about the GRE or even the GMAT is yes it's the number of questions that you do because then you'll get you know a sense of what kind of questions can be asked but what I found most helpful is that you know you do the question and then if you get it wrong you do it again like literally right away so you look at your mistake you understand what happened and then you do it right away so that the learning sticks with you then and there I think that's like my biggest study tip don't get super hung up on like the number of questions that you do but in the questions that you do do and especially that you get wrong but even in the ones that you get right make sure you really take the time to sit down understand you know whatever whatever that question is whether it be a math question or a grammar question just really gotta understand what happened and learn on the spot because I find that you know if I was just trying to do as many questions as possible and I wasn't really learning from my mistakes I would make the same mistakes on a similar type of question again so again just sit down take the time to correct it and it'll honestly save you a lot of time so that was kind of my weekday routine and every day before going to bed so I by my bedside table I would have this chunk of vocab words so the GRE is heavily heavily based on vocab for like the verbal section the GMAT was not as much hung up on vocab so for the GRE there's like a bank of maybe 300 words or so it was definitely like a couple it was a lot of words basically but I think a lot of them you'll you'll have heard before you'll be familiar but there are some words where you will not ever use this word well like at least in Daily like speaking terms they're not like normal words that people would just like throw out so I definitely suggest that you make a bank of flash cards with the word on the front and then the definition on the back and just like hints of how you remember it and just go through the deck every single night if I'm not doing that right before bed I don't know if it's just like me thinking it is and it's not like scientifically proven but I find that it like lets me sleep on it and absorb it and remember it better for the long term so that's something that I suggest as well so just carry around this deck of flashcards with you all the time and whenever you're like in your commute or just like sitting there just go through the flashcards really make it a part of your routine and then the last aspect of my studying plan was practice exams and this will segue into the section that's all about the practice exams so pretty much every Saturday before that Sunday course I would take one practice exam which takes about three hours to complete and about two and a half to three hours to correct so it's a large chunk of time like honestly if you're embarking on this like all the power to you because it's really going to take a toll on your just regular social life there are some things you're going to sacrifice but just know that it's it's temporary and like it's gonna be worth it in the long run but it was definitely like it sucked for a little bit but the practice exams I found was maybe like the most important kind of practice that you can get for the exam not only just in terms of like practicing the amount of questions but like most importantly to be able to understand how to pace yourself throughout the exam because obviously the exam is timed and doing that Under Pressure I think is super important to get that practice on to kind of like get a sense of your timing with questions the great thing about the GRE exam is that you can go back to questions so I always suggest that you do that to pace yourself even in the practice exams if you come across a question that is just like you know you're not gonna get it quickly it's gonna take some time skip it Mark it you can flag it right on the platform and then come back to it at the end so that's one of the great things about the GRE exam and I I think I heard that the GMAT is changing into that format as well but anyways so yeah about the practice exams I took about I think in the end I took about seven full length practice exams before taking like the real one and honestly by the time you take your fourth or the fifth one you kind of get a good idea or at least like a good estimate of where you're gonna land in your real exam so by your fifth exam if you're hitting your target score you should be really like comfortable and confident with where you're at and then your sixth and seventh one should really just be like the real practice like go into it like you're taking the real thing and then buy your final exam you're gonna it's gonna just feel like you're doing another practice one and you'll you'll be super comfortable with it alright so now I'm gonna talk about the online GRE experience so like a lot of other things in the world GRE exam had to figure out how to make this exam virtual during the lockdowns so I was able to take mine online as well I'm pretty sure that now you have the option to either take it at like a testing center in person or you can take it virtually online so at that point in time this was 2022 but I think I had the option to do it in person at that point but I I decided to take it uh online just because you know I was always studying in my living room slash dining room my things are familiar Etc so I was super happy that I had this option to do it at home so I'll kind of walk through how that works I was pretty impressed with how organized and well managed the experience was considering how new it is so essentially you're on your computer that you usually use and a few days before your actual scheduled exam they'll give you a link to test your computer so that all of you know the operating system the webcam everything is kind of like in line with what their system needs to properly Proctor the exam so make sure you do that check beforehand and then on the day of the exam like before you start you log and you're welcome by a proctor I didn't see this person on camera they were just on mic and they just kind of walk you through the instructions again which are very similar to the practice exam it's like a list of things that you can and can't do make sure that you have a whiteboard prepared because obviously you have to you have to have your own whiteboards so you can have a whiteboard like this just like that with white erase markers or you can also have a sheet of paper inside one of those plastic like clear plastic files so they're pretty flexible on what you can use but this one even though it's pretty big it was still acceptable for the test so the Proctor goes through the instructions and then after that you have to do a room tour with your camera on your laptop or your desktop so literally I had to do a 360 Tour of like my area from where I'm sitting they check the ceiling they check all around your table they check under the table on the floor under your chair they literally check everything so there was like no possible way to cheat honestly like it was it was really creepy how they wanted to check literally every single angle that you could props possibly put like I don't know material on so that's kind of like the check-in point before you start your exam and then once they're happy with that environment check they let you start the exam and then it's just really I found out the experience of taking the actual exam versus the practice exam online was pretty much the same even the the interface looked the same the buttons are all in the same place so yeah I really didn't remark anything that I was like oh my God this is different and then comes the time for your breaks so during your break you are allowed to go to the bathroom so again you have to like raise your hand and then they give you permission I think you have maybe it was like five or seven minutes but it's pretty short so you have to like go and then come back so make sure you also go to the bathroom before starting the exam just in case and then during your break definitely go just in case too it's always better to be safe than sorry so you can go to the bathroom obviously they don't follow you with the webcam into your bathroom that would be very unethical but you come back and then you do the same room check all around your space and then you proceed with the rest of your exam so after that's done and you're finally done with your actual exam they're like okay everything's good and then you click to the final page and you get your unofficial test score and thankfully I got what I needed so the official test score that I got is 162 on Quant 161 on verbal and five on the essay by the way the essay score they email it to you for me I think it took a week and a half to two weeks to get the official score so the essay score comes in the official one but you're verbal and Quant one comes right away when you're done so oh my God like that feeling of relief and just like feeling like you made it to the Finish Line at the end of a marathon I don't run marathons by my but I imagine this is what it would feel like it was like the greatest sense of relief in my life I was like oh my God I'm done I can forget all of this material I'm out of here so it was an amazing feeling so it was all worth it in the end so it's so important to know number one why you're taking this exam number two know that the sacrifices and just like the pain that goes into exam prep is really temporary you're gonna forget about it the next day basically and you know it's it's in service of a long-term goal so you can do it you definitely can um that was really my experience I hope it helped I hope it was informative and if you have any further like detailed questions you can always leave them down in the comments below so thanks again for watching and good luck and I'll see you next time bye guys thank you

Channel: Dahye Jung

Views: 18,412

Keywords: fashion

Id: KZKrlcNnxs4

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023