Firstly, I highly recommend finding these books through libraries or your school’s interlibrary loan systems. These tests are expensive, don’t buy these books unless you cannot find them at the library, and only buy used and cheap.

Study materials #1: free practice exams

ETS GRE

2 free ones here from the official ETS prep system

1 free one here from Manhattan Prep

Study materials #2: official ETS GRE test prep books

ETS GRE

These 3 books are the best for getting your feet wet and provide a great amount of study material for each section in the test.

Study materials #3: best math section-specific prep books

Manhattan Prep

These 6 books give an immense amount of material to master every type of question you’ll see in the quantitative section of the exam.

Study materials #4: verbal section-specific study tips/materials

Quizlet

The best prep for the reading comprehension questions is just doing a lot of practice tests. I do not think any prep books beyond the 3 official ETS GRE books are necessary for the verbal section.

The best prep for the vocab questions, is hands down Quizlet. I wrote down every single word I encountered during the months of studying that I didn’t know, and just used Quizlet’s Learn feature to learn vocab on my phone all day. My big study set can be found at https://quizlet.com/307736047/huge-vocab-set-flash-cards/.

This is person-dependent, as you likely know words I don’t and vice-versa, but searching “GRE vocab” in Quizlet is a great start

Study materials #5: writing section-specific study tips

ETS actually published all possible prompts you could see in the analytic writing section, https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/argument/pool and https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/issue/pool.

This study guide site organizes them quite helpfully, https://www.prepscholar.com/gre/blog/gre-essay-topics/

The best way to prepare is to time yourself typing up responses to various prompts with spell check off (as you will be slightly docked for spelling mistakes).

I also found online typing speed tests to be immensely helpful in getting me to type more quickly and more accurately. This one was my favorite, https://www.typingtest.com/.

Follow My Blog

Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Published by Jason Bennett

At Ursinus College in tandem with Bryn Mawr College, Lehigh University, University of Groningen, and Stony Brook University, I have studied atomic physics, AdS/CFT, gauge theory and gravity, and condensed matter theory. This is my 3rd year as a teaching professor at Villanova. My last position was teaching at Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Scripps colleges. I am passionate about helping students combat ‪imposter syndrome’s dangerous cousin, self-selection, by helping them in‬ their ‪applying to grad school, scholarships like the‬ ‪Fulbright, and undergraduate research experiences like NSF REUs. I serve on Villanova’s campus committee for the Fulbright every year so please reach out anytime for help with anything related you want to apply for/learn about! ‬One of my crowning achievements as a teacher/advisor was one of my seniors at the Claremont Colleges getting a Fulbright. We started her application from scratch after she reached out about it due to this icebreaker intro :)

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started