Through my long and tedious process of studying for the GRE (~ a month), I believe I have come up with the best tips that will help you ace the test–or at least help you do reasonably well. Personally I do not “believe” in the GRE but if you need to score high in math or english the following tips should help.

Best GRE Tips

1. Buy “Cracking the GRE” from Princeton Review (<$20).  This is by far my best tip. The math part is excellent. It teaches you not only the basics of all the things covered in the GRE but also a easy and quick way to do the problems. The book also stresses why it is good to follow the “easy way” and fall into the trap of working the problem in a “proper” way. As far as the verbal section, the books the covers all the essentials you need to know. However, you will quickly find out that the verbal part is 90% vocabulary knowledge. The book provides a “Hit Parade” list of about 300 popular words used in the the GRE. These words are a good starting point to increase your vocabulary.  In addition, Cracking the GRE provides the best analytical review section out of all the GRE tutorial books out there.

2.  Buy Kaplans’ Vocabulary Box ($12).  This is the best way to improve your vocabulary.  The box contains 500 flashcards of popular GRE words.  The flashcards are a great way to test yourself and they save you a great amount of time (trust me on this one).  Each flash cards includes: 1) a popular GRE word, 2) its definition, 3) a sentence using the word, 4)  Synonyms of the word and 5) its grammatical use (adjective, noun, verb).   The flashcards are practical and you can carry them anywhere.   My advice is to look at the most important cards first.  One way to do this is to first look at the words that are included in both Kaplan’s and Baron’s top GRE words lists; this website points out these words.  Next, I would look at the words that are used in the list from Kaplan and Cracking the GRE.  Finally, if you have time look at the rest of the words in the box.  500 is not that bad as you might think.  If you memorize 30 words per day you will be done in less than 3 weeks!

3.  Take Cracking The GRE’s online test prep.  The prep test is definitely 3x harder than the actual test.  This is a good thing though.  After taking this test you will definitely be more confident for the actual GRE test, especially for the math part.  The prep provides answers and solutions to all the questions and gives you a feedback score.

4.  Take the free practice tests from ETS.  This will help you practice and I have heard from many people that this test will give an accurate idea of what get on the actual test.

5. Buy Kaplan GRE Premier Program book. This book is not as good as Cracking the GRE but it does cover some points that other books don’t cover.  Plus the DVD included in the book offers several practice tests.  The more practice, the better!

6.  Improve your time management.   I cannot over-emphasize how important this is.  Definitely learn to time yourself while taking the prep tests.  Also, make sure you spend more time and attention on the first 10-15 questions of each section.  These questions  weight more and have a bigger impact on your final score.

So there you go.  These are the tips I strongly encourage everybody to follow.  If you considering spending a lot of hours preparing for the test then I would suggest buying the Baron books which give some nice additional tips and provide a thorough 3500 word list.  Also look at this Michigan State’s vocabulary website