Guys, if you’re going to be taking the GRE in the next two months, this is the only article you will ever need to ace the test. You can use this article to get a 320, 330, or even as close as 340, but you need to follow the schedule diligently. Going right from beginner to expert, your day-by-day plan is mapped out right here, and this is the latest one for 2023 and other candidates, of course, in the future as well. The important thing here is that there’s no coaching needed. Very important works for everyone—students, working professionals—we’ve created for every single kind of person, and really no matter what you’re doing, you can pull this off just by following this proven methodology. A lot of study material is going to be made available to you when you go ahead and sign up on ymgrad.com. Very important, to remember that.
The Importance of Following the Schedule
So, before we get into the schedule, a little bit about me. I took the GRE myself, and over here you can see my scores—they’re a little shy of 330 itself. It’s been a long time since I took the test, but I’ve been working with a lot of students as well, helping them ensure that they get similar scores if not better. I’ve made hundreds of customized plans just like the one that I’m going to be giving you in this video for free, by the way, and all of those have been paid until now. On top of that, we have also helped 5,000 questions get into their dream universities overseas. We do a lot of stuff, including SOPs and LOIs, and if you’re interested, you can always take a look at ymgrad.com and check out the services section. But this video is about the two-month GRE prep plan, everything is mapped out, so let’s begin.
Here’s the plan for you guys right here. The first thing you have to do is go ahead to the ETS website and book the test. Very important. Why do I want you to book the test? It’s simple:, until you have that deadline hanging over your head, until you have that deadline that you need to finish by this point in time, your money goes to waste. You won’t get serious, which happens with a lot of people. Trust me, having that deadline can help massively. Choose a date in advance so that you can get the date that you want without paying any extra charges. A lot of people book the test at the last moment, which is again a bad thing—you pay more. We can avoid all of that by just booking the test.
Booking the GRE Test
The second thing that we’re going to be doing under this plan is that we want to understand our current performance, so we’ll take a mock test. All right, we need to understand. Every person is different from point A to point B. Maybe for someone, point A is 300, and they just want to get to 320. But for another person, point A could just be 315, and maybe they just want to get to 325. Again, it’s a very different scenario, and you need to understand what is your point A and what is your point B. Where do you currently stand, and what is your goal?
Number three: what are we going to talk about here? Which study material to use? I’m going to be giving you the exact names that you need to ace. Now, of course, this does depend on your current performance, your point A, and your point B, but from a general point of view, this is what I would recommend. There are, of course, two types of study materials: number one, concept building; number two, practice. First, let’s talk about concept building. For concept building, I highly recommend that you stay away from ETS material. If you follow ETS material—the official test makers’ material itself—you will actually fall into their trap. You will think that the test is too easy, but when you actually go on to the test on D-Day, you’re going to realize that it’s actually way harder than they show it, and the concepts, of course, are also not explained so well in ETS materials. They just go over them from a bird’s eye view, really. So, for concept building, the only material that I recommend, and this is the only time I’ll tell you to invest a little bit, is the Magoosh GRE questions and video pack. You get it anywhere—you get it from the official website, you get it from our partner website where you can get it cheaper as well at newstudymaterial.com. But this is the only premium material that you will ever require for concept building, and I’ll highly recommend you go for that because it really does actually boost your score based on what I’ve seen for most applicants.
But if you’re not willing to invest, that’s okay. I have an alternative for you, and this one is available for free: the Manhattan eight books. These are, of course, available for free on the Library Genesis website. You go ahead, find these books, type in their names, and you can download all the guides in PDF form. Very conveniently, you can use them on your laptop.
Next, number two: what kind of material will you be using for practice? Very important over here, pay attention again—Magoosh 1000 questions. If you’ve bought the video package that comes with a thousand questions, you’re good to go right out of the box, and they are very close to the actual level of the GRE. So, I highly recommend that you use these. There’s also the Manhattan five-pound book; this is, again, one of the best resources if you would like to take the GRE, and I highly, highly recommend it. Finally, if you’ve exhausted all of these resources, then you can move on to the Princeton 1014 GRE questions book. Again, this is one that I recommend that you use as a last resort—you probably won’t need anything else after this one.
All right, we’re good to go. Let’s finally get to the chase: let’s talk about the prep plan day by day. What do you have to do depending on, again, you know, who you are essentially and where you stand? Remember point A and point B. We’re going to do this in three phases. The first phase is essentially just concept building, so this is going to be in untimed mode entirely. Remember, phase one is going to give us about one month, so we have to finish it within one month. To make it easier for you, I recommend that you spend two to three days per chapter for quant and six to eight days per question type for verbal. Very important: note it down if you have to, but take care of these.
Practice Material for GRE Preparation
What do you do in this month? The first day, you pick up any chapter, you start watching the Magoosh videos if you have access to them, or you finish up that chapter from the Manhattan books. Study that particular chapter; it could be anything. It could be just fractions and decimals, could be anything. But whatever chapter you pick up, you finish that and you make the notes. Why do you want to make the notes? It’s because when you revise, you don’t want to go ahead and watch the videos again or read the entire book again. You’ve just want all the important formulas and all the important things that you, as a person, did not know to be jotted down.
All right, now if you’re short on time, you can take a look at my notes as well. I actually have them up on newstudymaterial.com as well, but I highly recommend that you make your own because that would actually be very catered to your particular requirements. Finally, once you’re done watching the videos and making the notes, what I recommend is that you start practicing. That means you start practicing but in untimed mode. Hence, what I want you to do is on the first day itself, after you have watched the videos or made the notes from the book itself, you go ahead and do 50 questions. I recommend that you do these 50 questions in untimed mode. I recommend that you do only about five to ten at a time so that again, we’re focusing on those questions rather than just running through them. The goal is not to finish off the questions; the goal is to spend time reviewing and understanding where you are going wrong at this point. So, important: just do about 10 questions, review them, and repeat this five times. All right, that’s day one for you. They do it again—you do the same thing. You do the questions. This time, you can revise the notes if you want in the morning, and then you do the questions again in untimed mode. And if you’re still not able to do it, you spend the third day doing the same thing. But again, it’s really important that you get the gesture over here. We don’t want to exhaust the questions; we want to use a little bit of questions, really just 10 at a time max, and then we want to go ahead and review very, very quickly. Very important: remember, finally, you always review, very important, and then you move on, right? From day one itself, again, you pick up another chapter, and you do this again and again, just like that. I told you the schedule—very easy, right? Same thing for quant and verbal, but this happens every single day. So, in parallel, you’re doing both quant and verbal also on the same day every single day.
Once phase one is over, you move on to phase two. Very important: this is your testing phase. What is the testing phase? You actually see if you’re able to retain the performance that you had in untimed mode, but only this time with the timer. This phase is going to be for 20 days. So, remember, you must be quicker than phase one. All right, what you have to do over here is you pick up a chapter, you revise its notes—important, really easy. All right, and then you start off with the questions. You practice 60 questions in timed mode. How do you do these 60 questions? You do 20 at a time, just like the actual GRE, right? You do 20 questions, you give yourself 30 or 35 minutes depending on the section, of course, and an official timer. Same thing, right? You review everything. So, you do this five times, and your 60 questions are done. Of course, after you’re done, very important, you review, and as long as you’re doing well, you don’t really need to spend too much time. You can move on to the next chapter. But within 20 days, you’ve got to finish everything—quant and verbal—with timed mode. Remember, it’s going to be easy because in phase one, you’ve already studied all of this.
Phase three: mock tests. Here’s what you gotta do: every single day, you take a mock test. That’s easy, right? You don’t have to do too much. You take a mock test in the morning, you review it in the afternoon, and if you have some weaknesses, you work on them in the evening. That’s it. That’s phase three for you. Remember, phase three is going to be for 10 days. Of course, if you can do more, do more. It depends on you, but at least for 10 days, I recommend at least taking 10 mock tests before you go ahead and sit for the GRE. This will get your mind and your body used to actually sitting down for four hours and taking the test.
Now, you’re gonna ask me, “That’s okay, but where do we get the best mock tests?” Which are the best ones? See, mock tests come in the form of online accounts, so they’re not going to be in the form of books. Chances are, you may not be able to get them for free, but at the same point in time, you can get them for discounted prices on the same website, newstudymaterial.com. Which are the best mock tests to take? I’ll tell you in the order you should be taking them. You start with Kaplan tests. All right, Kaplan tests are great, really good results, really close to the actual test. Then you move on to the Princeton ones. Again, same—they’re really good, they also evaluate the AWA, by the way. Finally, you move on to the Manhattan ones. All right, that’s also going to give you about six tests over here, so that’s also great, and they have very good, very tough tests. And for the last two days, you leave for the ETS PowerPrep. Why only the last two days? These are the most accurate, but they have one thing: what is it? They don’t offer a review. Hence, you don’t want to do them in the first couple of days because you would not be able to review them. That’s what you’ve got to do—do them in this order itself, all right? Again, you don’t have to buy all the tests. You just take any device, I believe, and you should be good to go because there’s, I think, a lot more than 10 here.
A couple of pro tips just before you leave: hear me out. Very important. I know a lot of you guys are facing issues with your vocabulary. I know it’s hard, and you’re focusing on GRE materials. So, always focus on making your own dictionary, but also do this 800-word list by Barron’s. Very important, all right, because they actually have a very good hit ratio. It’s very easy. You just sign up on ymgrad.com, you complete the offer of the year, and you will basically get all these study materials directly delivered to you in your email within the next 30 minutes. On top of that, of course, this word list is given to you for free. Within that, you can also just search it on Google. A lot of times, you can find it over there as well. But yeah, don’t miss out on Barron’s 800-word list—it’s important.
Final Preparation for the GRE Test
The next thing when we are practicing for AWA: I know we didn’t talk about that a lot, but you must understand this. You write your answers on a Windows or MacBook Notepad. Do not use Microsoft Word because that would underline the parts where you get the wrong spelling or your tense isn’t correct and all that. We don’t want any of that, okay? Because you will not have that on the actual test, so we really don’t need to make it more complicated. We just want to replicate as closely as possible, really. Finally, after you write down the AWA, the time is over, and you go ahead and evaluate it on this tool called Grammarly. Use the free version or the pro version—I don’t mind—but use it so that you at least understand your mistakes and you stop making them over time.
And of course, for more such tips and tricks, you can also subscribe to this channel where we have a lot more content for you guys, and follow us on Instagram where we post a lot more about this as well. I hope that you guys get a massively amazing score—whatever you thought, maybe two or three points more than that in most cases. But yeah, let me know your scores down below. I hope that this video helps. Goodbye and take care until next time.