VERBAL REASONING
READING COMPREHENSION: The test does not come down to how well you “understood what you read.” Rather, the test is measuring how well you can arrive at the best answer. Therefore, it is essential that you are able to make nuanced distinctions between the answer choices and are confident that you know what types of answers the test-makers are looking for.
SENTENCE EQUIVALENCE: Sure, having a compendious vocabulary helps, but no matter how good your vocabulary is, there are going to be words you don’t know on the GRE. And this is by design. They are not simply testing your vocabulary; they are testing VERBAL LOGIC - or, your ability to arrive at the best answers, even when you don’t know all the words in the problem.
TEXT COMPLETION: On most problems, this type of problem tends to involve words you know; the challenge is to untangle the logic of the sentences, to arrive at the best word choices. Fortunately, the test-makers use only a handful of models on which they base all their questions. Knowing these models - and looking for them - is a big head start!
QUANTITATIVE REASONING
The GRE goes back to all the math you learned in high school and moves the ball forward a little bit, by introducing some advanced data analysis. There are four subjects: Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry and Data Analysis. However, in addition to reviewing these four subjects, it is essential that you understand the LOGIC behind QUANTITATIVE COMPARISON problems, which span all four math subjects. It is crucial that you have a strategic approach to these problems.
Additionally, there are many savvy test-taking tricks and techniques that can make all algebraic problems much easier.
ANALYTICAL WRITING TASKS
The Argument and Issue Tasks test your ability to analyze an argument and also to build an argument. Knowing the nuts and bolts of both is essential, but it is equally as important to be confident that you know what you’re going to write about - and how you’re going to structure your work — in advance.
TIME MANAGEMENT
You need a comprehensive time-management strategy for the entire test. Going as fast as you can is not a great option. Rather, you must know where to invest your time and what to work around, and you need to determine (through guided experimentation) your idea pace: it is somewhere between going slowly enough to get every problem right and rushing.
And it is different for every student.