Tevia

Thank you UFGator! I think it was partly a matter of luck. Also the fact that my mother tongue is Spanish contributed quite a bit.

Took the GRE on Dec. 20th. Wish I had done better in the quants part, since I'm applying for grad school in Economics (MA or MSc) . The verbal score was quite a surprise, considering I'm not a native speaker, nor did I study as much as I did for the quant part. I started reviewing in Oct. 15, being somewhat productive some days while not at all productive the others. For the quant part, I did all of NOVA general prep exercises and Barron's quant. They are both good in particular areas. NOVA has a lot of exercises and an extensive coverage of GRE topics, however some of the exercises are way too lengthy in terms of calculations, which is not at all useful for GRE. On the other hand, Barron's is good at pointing out at some tricks and key facts that might help to find you the shortest way. For the verbal part , I only read through Barron's word list. At first I intended to learn most of it by hearth, but I couldn't bother, so I followed the advice by some members here and did some tests from the big book (maybe 6 or 7). This was good practice, since instead of learning individual words , it helped me "get the feeling" of groups of words. I didn't practice much for the AWA. Probably wrote 2 or 3 essays for each section. Hopefully will get a decent score. Finally I took 3 CATs from Kaplan's software and the 2 CAts by power prep. They are both good, and I would strongly suggest to allocate as much time as you can for practicing under timed conditions. The content of the test is not really difficult, but the psychological factor is crucial. All in all, I think allocating 3 months should be enough to ace the exam. It's important to get your hands on CAT trials, the sooner the better, especially for the q part. For the verbal, big book should be enough, especially if you have decent vocab to start with.