<p>I don’t understand - why do you want SAT prep tips? If you already graduated with a bachelor’s, you want to be preparing for the GRE. Truthfully they are very similar.</p>
<p>There are two components to the GRE IMO - content knowledge and the strategies for the test. The content knowledge (knowing the vocabulary, having solid reading comprehension skills, knowing how to do basic high school math up to geometry/trigonometry) will get you into around the 500 range. When I used to tutor the SAT for Kaplan I learned that students with scores in the 500-600 range were the most easily tutored because they already had the basic knowledge they needed to get high scores but just need strategies. If you don’t have the content knowledge - say you don’t remember anything about geometry or algebra - you need to do more intensive prep. Buy a GRE math review book and review the math, or get a book that has GRE words and make flashcards for the ones you don’t know.</p>
<p>Personally, I worked on test-taking strategies. I already knew the vast majority of the words on the SAT and GRE because I am an avid reader and have a large vocabulary - so I didn’t need the flashcards.</p>
<p>For the SAT, I took the test cold the first time. I scored pretty well, but I wanted to get higher. This was in the spring of my sophomore year, so I just did well in my math classes for my junior year of high school. In the early to mid spring of junior year, I got an SAT book and started working on the problems. Then I scored myself and looked at which question types I needed to work on, and worked on those. I spent more time on math than verbal because my verbal score was already really high. Then I took the SAT again in the spring of my junior year - the May date.</p>
<p>After that, I studied a little more over the summer between junior and senior year - I wanted to get my verbal score up as high as I could get it and maybe improve my math score a little. I took the test again October of senior year, my verbal score went up but my math score actually went down 20 points. In the end, my super score was 800 verbal/660 math. (There was no writing when I took it in 2003.)</p>
<p>For the GRE, I already kind of knew where my strengths and weaknesses were because of the SAT, but I had an advantage because I tutored SAT verbal for a year in college. I bought a GRE book (without the CD - I hated doing the problems online) and used the same strategy, spending a bit of time diagnosing my problems and then working on those sections more. I knew that I sucked at analogies (the one question I missed on the verbal section was an analogy, but back then you could get one question wrong and still get an 800 because my test date was difficult) and the antonyms, because there was less context, so I worked on those the most. I also spent some significant time on the math work - I did the whole review section in the book I bought because even though I had taken statistics and am pretty math-minded I didn’t have to do serious algebra or geometry since high school. I spent the most time just doing math problems over and over again, and figuring out where I was getting tripped up and what I was skipping.</p>
<p>In the end my GRE score was 790 verbal/740 math/6.0 AW.</p>
<p>And I go to Columbia :D</p>