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G...R...E... Yikes! Those three letters instantly make me anxious!
But before I dive into my paragraphs of advice on preparing for the GRE, you probably want to know what my advice is worth. In other words, you probably want to know how well I did on the GRE before you're going to care about my advice. Well, the average of all my scores was fell in about the 75th percentile. So I didn't really "rock" the GRE so to speak, but I did very well, and I was accepted into 3 of the 5 doctoral programs that I applied to as a result. So take this advice in that context:
First, don't try to wing the GRE. I can't think of a better way to waste the $100+ you'll spend to take it. I know a few rich idiots who tried to wing the GRE and they all did worse than average. You can get practice GRE tests inside the preparation books that every large bookstore sells, so there's no reason to waste your money or demolishing your self-esteem by winging the real test. Study hard before you take the GRE, even if it's your first time.
I took 5 practice tests (out of a Barron's How to Prepare for the GRE book) and found a huge difference between my 1st-time scores and 2nd-time scores. So even if you don't study anything, practicing the test might help your scores a lot (remember the idea of "practice effects" or "testing effects" from your research methods class?).
The analytical section has changed since 1999. Click here to access a brief note about the new Analytical Writing section.
But how should you prepare for the GRE? I don't think the $200 Kaplan/Princeton/etc. crash courses are really that helpful. Friends of mine who took these courses claimed to benefit from them, but these friends also admitted that they didn't have the self-discipline to sit down and prepare for the GRE by themselves. (This made me wonder why they were interested in applying to graduate school in the first place!) I never took such a course. I used the inexpensive Barron's preparation book that I referred to above (which cost less than $30), and spent a few torturous weeks going through it.
Preparation books like these can really pay off. One of the nice things about the Barron's book that I had was that it had a "high frequency word list" in the middle of it. This list contained words that have supposedly shown up rather frequently over the years on each successive version of the GRE. I was skeptical, but I memorized all of the words on the list anyway. Boy, did it pay off! I was amazed to find that when I got to the vocabulary in the Verbal section of the GRE, nearly 1/3 of the words I was asked to identify were from the Barron's list that I had memorized. (Of course, many people now have web sites with high frequency word lists on them now, so a careful search should pay off for you too.)
So how long did I prepare for the GRE? I decided to work part-time instead of full-time one summer in order to devote a lot of time to studying. I spent 10-20 hours a week from May through July preparing, and then took the test in early August. Some of my friends said that they thought it was a lot easier to take the expensive courses rather than exercise their own self-discipline, but I was terrified enough about this test that I had no trouble staying motivated to study on my own. So if you're rich and lazy, take the preparation courses. If you're poor and strongly motivated, buy a good preparation book and plan to spend long hours in a quiet, lonely place.
Some notes about the content of the GRE general test: study up on your algebra, your geometry formulas, your basic rules of logic, and your vocabulary! Preparation books will usually help you with all of these areas. But to make sure that you have the most up-to-date information on the content of the GRE, make sure you have read all about it on the GRE web site. The test is updated constantly, and you better make sure that all of your information is current.
That's all of the advice I have on preparing for the the General Test. Maybe you would like to take a look at another page called 7 Ways to Raise Your G.R.E. score.
The rest of this page is on the Subject (Psychology) Test.
I have very little advice on the Subject test because I'm not really sure why I did so well (95th percentile). But here's how I suggest you prepare:
Before you take the Subject test, make sure you need to take it first! I recommend that you email two professors on the admissions committee of each program that you are applying to, ask them whether the subject test is required, and then follow their counsel on whether you should take it or not. Many schools have outdated applications and instructions, and it would be a real shame if you spent time, money and effort on a test that you didn't even need to take.
If you do have to take the Subject test, the most important thing is to take the right undergraduate classes in the first place. Hopefully, your major requirements forced you to take Intro Psych, Cognition, Comparative/Behavior Analysis/Learning, Sensation and Perception, Abnormal/Clinical, Social, Statistics, Methods, Personality, and History. If you still have time, try to take those courses before you take the subject test. If you haven't taken 1 or 2 of those courses, don't worry about it, but if you've missed most of those courses, you're simply not going to do very well on the subject test.
All I did to prepare for this one was grab a couple of good Intro textbooks and review, review, review. You can usually find textbooks in used bookstores or on eBay or Half.com. You might be surprised, as you go through all of the bold-faced terms in old textbooks at how much stuff you actually remember. I found that I was especially weak in some of the major developmental stages (who remembers all of Freud's or Erikson's stages in order, anyway?), so I really memorized those carefully. Also, I never took Sensation and Perception or Personality as an undergraduate, so I studied those chapters even more intensely than I studied the rest of the chapters in the textbooks I was reviewing. Figure out your own weaknesses as you study, and try to compensate for them.
Pay attention to famous names. If you ignored them in your classes, it might hurt on this test. You're expected to know who Milgram, Piaget, Neisser, Festinger, Ellis, Pavlov and Fechner are, for example. Hopefully, as an advanced undergraduate, you'll be able to relearn those quickly and easily becuase they come up regularly in most classes. If a person is talked about to any extent in an Introductory Psychology text, you'll definitely want to know who they are.
Remember that on the subject test answering an item incorrectly hurts more than if you skip it (they have a weird weighting system on the subject test, but not the general test). So if you really don't know how to answer an item because you didn't study it at all, you can skip it. Of course, if you skip too many, you will have a hard time scoring highly, so here's the heuristic I used: if you can narrow it down to one of two answers, go ahead and guess, because you have a 50% chance of getting it right. If you can't rule out a single one of the answers, you're better off skipping it. Make sure you answer at least 85% of the questions, though.
That's it for my advice on both GRE tests!