GRE course

Just buy a book and study by yourself. to study the vocab, i used a flashcard program called "flash card" and made my own lists.

Take the practice test provided by GRE, and buy its book. The most important factor is understanding the item types on the test. I wouldn't waste my money on a course.

It's not all that different from the SAT really. The verbal is a bit more difficult and has more focus on analogies and antonyms and less on reading, but the math is not at all bad if you've been doing math during your undergrad.

I actually did better on the GRE math than the SAT math, without any studying. I did take a number of math courses and did a math intensive major though. I ended up at 99th percentile on the verbal (730) and that was 70 points lower than my SAT, which gives you some idea of how much harder the verbal is. I have no idea what kind of mutant freak pulls off an 800 verbal on the GRE.

If you're going for engineering or comp sci, they have pretty high expectations for math, but some fairly basic studying on algebra and geometry (probably more likely to be rusty on, I know I was) will bring that up.

Yes. Got accepted to 5/9 schools. Of the 9, 2 were Ivies; got into both.

When I applied last year for grad school, the average math score was about 760-780 for top 40 science/engineering programs.

For the analogies, you are given a word or a pair of words, then you have to find something that has the same meaning/relationship. Sometimes I didn't even know the meaning of any of the words and was screwed.

In chemistry (my field), most programs don't really give a shit about GREs. They have almost no relationship to research ability, but the graduate program wants a certain score for the rankings. As long as you're in the 1300+ total range you're fine from everything I saw. I know some other fields are really picky about the math, mostly because people tend to blow it out of the water. 800 isn't even 99th percentile, which is nuts (especially compared to the verbal rankings).

I was one of the really weird science students with a better verbal than math. Had a couple potential advisers comment on that. Well, it's an adaptive test. It will automatically get to the point that it's essentially impossible if you're doing well. I had a sequence where I answered two questions more or less by good guessing, then got one where I'd never ever seen any of the words in the question or any of the answers. Randomly guessed, then got something stupid like "Cat is to dog as", and went on with the test. I'm used to doing fairly well on those standardized vocab tests (got an 800 SAT verbal), and it was a shock getting something that hard.

The recently revised test does not have antonyms or analogies.

How recent was that? I took it in 2005, good on them if they changed it.

I don't know about the GRE - I took the GMAT, but I just went to the library got a few Kaplan and Princeton Review books and used those. I scored well enough to get in everywhere I wanted - net cost was $1.20 in late fees.

As of August 1, 2011.

That's good, the test could have used some changes.

That's not necessarily a good thing. When I took the GRE in Oct 2010, I had an experimental math section and there was free response and multiple choice with multiple answers. It was much more difficult than the scored math section.