Back to All Posts
GRE: A Honest Review
General October 20, 2025 10 min read

GRE: A Honest Review

By Tirath Bhathawala

How I prepared for the GRE (and why you should avoid repeating me)

Graduate Record Examinations: big name, bigger nerves. At first glance it seemed simple: math and English. As an engineering student I assumed Quant would be easy and Verbal a minor chore. The test turned out to be more complicated: it blends both skills across sections, and the real limiter was not content gaps but small, repeatable mistakes.

Over the next two months my confidence swung between “I can solve anything” and “please someone tell me which option is correct.” I’m sharing what worked, what didn’t, and the concrete changes that turned my prep around so you don’t have to repeat all my mistakes.

Mood swings during prep

1. Where I went wrong (early mistakes)

My initial plan was naïve: two weeks for Quant, then jump to Verbal. Two problems with that:

  • Siloed practice. The GRE is a single test with interleaved Quant and Verbal sections. Practicing them in isolation left me unprepared for the mental context switches on test day.
  • Inconsistent effort. I swung between hyper-productive days (50 correct answers in a row) and days I couldn’t be bothered to review basic algebra. That inconsistency meant I finished only arithmetic and algebra by week three; Geometry and Data Analysis were still pending.

I rushed the tail end of Quant (focusing on quantity, not quality), then entered college with Verbal still to be completed: a timing disaster.

Too many MCQs, too little focus

2. The turning point (diagnostics and planning)

I postponed the test three weeks and took a diagnostic mock: 165Q / 152V. Not catastrophic, but not target-grade either. The diagnostic helped me in two concrete ways:

  1. Prioritize weaknesses. Quant errors were mostly careless; Verbal problems were vocabulary and RC strategy.
  2. Make a realistic plan. I adopted a rhythm: three Verbal days → one Quant day (Quant days were dedicated to timed practice + error forensics).

Fixing careless Quant mistakes required disciplined timed practice and a forensic review of each missed question. For Verbal, the focus became vocabulary throughput and deliberate RC question classification.

Old vs new practice problems

3. Test day (first attempt and lessons learned)

I finished the main stretch of preparation feeling confident, my full-length mocks had averaged 168Q / 158V, and went into test day with a tight revision plan: vocab review, a checklist of Quant formulae, RC and TC/SE strategies, and a time-management sheet that specified how long to spend on each question type. I even warmed up with a 20-question mini-test on the way to the centre and felt sharp.

The test itself started well: AWA flowed, the first Quant section felt familiar, and Verbal was manageable. The centre was calm (I remember noting the decent keyboard and headphones), and the second Quant section was “normal but slightly lengthy.” By the time I left the room I was convinced I’d scored at least in the high 160s for Quant.

The score report was a reality check: 164Q / 159V. The Verbal score was close to practice, but the Quant score was a clear outlier: below my practice range and below the threshold for several target programs. That single shortfall hurt my profile more than I expected and taught me three hard lessons:

  • Small, repeatable mistakes matter more than conceptual gaps. My prep had left a few “silly” behaviours (rushed arithmetic steps, rushed DA interpretation, sloppy time checks) that I was still making under pressure. Those are the errors that turn a 168 average into a 164 on the real day.
  • Mocks must be diagnostic, not just score-driven. It’s easy to treat mock scores as the only metric. What matters more is why you miss questions, the root cause (timing, careless arithmetic, misreading), and whether the same error repeats.
  • Test-day conditions expose weak habits. My time-management sheet looked great on paper, but under timed pressure I sometimes submitted answers without the final sanity-check I’d reliably done during practice.

If you take only one practical idea from this section: track every mistake in a tiny log (question type → error type → fix). If the same error shows up twice in three tests, it becomes a non-negotiable practice item until it stops recurring.

4. The retake (a counterintuitive strategy)

After the shock of my first score, I didn’t rush straight back into the same preparation loop. I scheduled TOEFL and college midterms first (about twenty days), and then deliberately changed my approach based on one guiding thought, the Einstein quip I kept on repeat:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

That dictum pushed me to change the process instead of piling on more content. Concretely, my retake strategy was minimal and surgical:

  • Primary focus on official material. I centered my work on ETS official problems and the ETS Math Review. These materials mirror the test’s style and expose exactly the kinds of wording and traps ETS uses.
  • Zero new strategy videos. I stopped consuming new tactics and instead practiced the strategies I already knew until they became reflexive. Watching another “how to do RC” video would only re-introduce noise.
  • Tight vocab maintenance. Rather than expanding my word list, I cycled the difficult words I’d already seen until recall was effortless. Quality of recall beat quantity.
  • Targeted Quant hygiene. On Quant days I did timed sets and then performed a forensic review: recreate the thought process that led to each wrong answer, find the cognitive lapse (rushing, misread, bad diagram), and practice the exact micro-skill to prevent recurrence.

Psychologically this felt counterintuitive: I was intentionally not overpreparing. Practically it paid off: on the retake I finished the second Quant section with around ten minutes to spare and was able to cross-check answers; the test felt cleaner and less frantic. The result: 170Q / 162V - 332 total.

Test day drama — second attempt

5. Recommended materials & a practical routine

There’s plenty of GRE material online. My recommendation: pick one high-quality resource + ETS official materials, and stick to it.

What I used / recommend

  • Core: ETS GRE Math Review + official GRE practice books.
  • Course: GregMat for vocab, RC strategy, and structured practice (don’t slavishly follow every schedule).
  • Extras: PrepSwift / Khan Academy only if you need conceptual refreshers.

Weekly cadence that worked

  • 3 days Verbal (vocab + RC practice)
  • 1 day Quant (timed sets + error diagnosis)
  • Every 7–10 days: full-length mock under exam conditions
  • Final week: reserve ETS PowerPrep (and PowerPrepPlus if possible) as your primary sims

Retake success

6. Practical tips & common traps

  • Consistency > intensity. Regular, daily work beats sporadic marathon sessions.
  • Diagnose every mistake. For Quant, treat each “silly” error as a bug to be fixed.
  • Classify RC questions. Learn a repeatable approach and practice it on ETS passages.
  • Use official ETS tests last. They are the closest to the actual test interface and timing.
  • Retakes are normal. Analyze, adapt, and retake when necessary.

Congrats — you survived

7. Quick-resource list

Final takeaways (TL;DR)

  1. Don’t silo Quant and Verbal - practice their interplay.
  2. Fix behavioral errors (timing, careless mistakes) instead of accumulating more content.
  3. Adopt a single, solid study resource plus ETS official materials.
  4. Make RC practice deliberate and repeatable.
  5. Retakes are often just part of the process - analyze, adapt, and try again.

Have questions or thoughts on this topic? Feel free to reach out via the contact page!