u/maghanja1

I have taken the GRE about 3 times now and honestly all three times my scores have been not the best.

GRE 1: This was more like an expensive practice test because I was not ready or where I should have been at all. I ended up getting a 155V and 156Q

I went back and began to take it more seriously using GregMat One Month plan and doing regular practice test alongside ETS Practice Plus 1 and 2. For Practice Test 1: I got 153V and 155Q. That was kind disappointing since I believed that I had done enough and understood the concepts really well. For Test 2 I got 158V and 162Q.

GRE 2: This time I went in more confident but still a bit nervous since I had barely made the cut off for the 320. I ended up doing better in verbal but did not improve at all for Quant with 158V and 156Q.

After that I went back saw I was having issues with qualitative comparison problems in quant, but my major issue was that I did not learn any of the test taking strats for quant and spent too much time on certain problems. I went back and did timed practice from GregMat, 5LB book, and any other book that I could get my hands on for Quant, but kind of ignored Verbal practice and test taking strats. I did look at it the week before my test by reviewing all of the GregMat Prepswift content as a refresher for Verbal. By the end of this 40 day period I was able to get around 162-165 for most practice material with my lowest score being an 20/25 in one of the Kaplan ETS Books.

GRE 3: This time I was really confident. I applied some math strat for verbal, I summarized the RC passage, and I did the matching strat for all the vocab. For Quant I felt great only marking 3 for review. I haven't gotten my official score, but this time I ended up getting a 152V and 161Q. I am very disappointed because I thought I was applying the proper strats just like Greg taught me.

Application deadlines for the school I want to get into are August 1, so there is one more potential window for me to take the GRE on July 23. That give me 18 days from this post to raise my score from 313 to 320+.

My current plan and please correct me if this is the route to take or not:

• Verbal
  • Use Big Book to review RC and Vocab based questions
  • Try to summarize in 5 words and include the function of each passage/sentence as Greg mention
  • Try and read longer articles to get better reading comprehension as it seems like I struggle with this the most
• Quant
  • Continue to review problems as to not loose my edge on these sort of problems
  • Maybe use Big Book to ensure that the foundations are good
• Overall - Talk to tutor from GregMat as I am unsure what else I can do beyond this.

Is 320 even possible in 18 days from 313? Any and advice is appreciated.

I have been using GregMat to practice and learn the material as much as possible. I can see the progress on Quant, but somehow my Verbal got a lot worse. That made me confused because between every test I have been practicing vocab as well as quant.

Here is more or less a break down of my studying and preparation:

Study Main Material:

- GregMat

- 5lb Book

- ETS Official Quant and Verbal

- Kaplan 2019

- Manhattan 2017

Supplementary Study Material:

- All GRE books available to me in my local libraries which I mainly use to test if I had learned my material.

Timelines of Studying and test taken:

Test 1:

- Used GregMat following the one month plan to learn the material, and did a lot of practice from 5lb book. I did not take practice test or follow test taking strats.

Test 2:

- Did GregMat Prepswift and was able to learn better, and did more practice problems. This time around I did practice test but I did not do any real timed tests. This was my downfall and I ran out of time during my test.

Test 3:

- At this point I saw that my quant was around average and slowly improving with my vocab, so I shifted to focus on Quant. I did a lot of practice and I feel like I was getting 18/20, 19/20, 48/50, pretty much 905+ higher for most of the tests I took. For verbal it was staying in the same lane around 80-85%. I believed that I was following all of the GregMat test taking starts for both Verbal and Quant:

- Verbal:

--I rephrased all of the sentences to make sure that I comprehended. I did pairing strat, I tried to do math strat, but I think I need to practice this more. Pairing is ok, but I think I suffer from not knowing all vocab.

After thinking about it I think that I had some trouble with getting the main points, and all the information from the articles; strange because I am summarizing and rephrasing in my own words. I do think that I need to go back to GregMat and see what he recommends. If there is anything else that I can do for this I would love to hear the feedback.

- Qaunt:

-- I can always get better but I believe that I made a lot of progress.

I believe that I can get a better score especially on verbal because this last time I'm not even sure what that was. I would love some feedback and to get more tips on how to improve. For my next time I will be practicing Quant one day, verbal the next, etc.

With that said if anyone is looking for a study buddy in LA Area please let me know.