Links to free prep:
Khan academy SAT prep. There are practice tests as well as prep for specific abilities (e.g. quadratic functions).
Khan academy LSAT prep. Never tried it, but probably good.
GRE 5 lb book of problems (libgen). 1800 pages of GRE problems.
GRE vocabulary list (spreadsheet). Compilation of GRE vocabulary lists. Lots of overlap between lists, and most weird words on the real test are somewhere here.
MCAT prep materials (libgen).
The convention when giving advice on how to do well on these scholastic tests is to post your own scores. Given that most of the variation in scholastic ability is due to genes (~60% for grades, ~85% for IQ), chances are the people who got very high scores got them because of high levels of innate ability, not their great ideas on how to prepare for the test.
My scores aren’t impressive, but are still reasonably high:
SAT 1st att: 66th percentile reading, 95th percentile math
SAT 2nd att: 94th percentile reading, 99.6th percentile math
GRE 1st att: 78th percentile verbal, 68th percentile quant
GRE 2nd att: 94th percentile verbal, 83rd percentile quant.
The most notable result is the massive drop (more than 2 standard deviations) in mathematical ability from the 2nd attempt on the SAT to the 1st attempt on the GRE. There were two factors that resulted in this drop: one was luck, as I had scored below all four of the practice tests I took, and the other problem was that I had forgotten some of the math. Unfortunately, this wasn’t obvious until I had sat down after the test and realized that I was making very silly mistakes in the moment (e.g. converting A is half of B to A/2 = B).
In terms of general advice on the tests, the first thing I would suggest is to not buy practice materials. Practice books for most tests can be pirated on libgen, and the khan academy practice that is available for the SAT/LSAT is free and high quality.
Besides that, don’t overthink physical/mental health optimizations because they have very weak effects on performance (d = ~.1).
Based on observational data, sleeping less than 8 hrs may even improve scores, as these people have roughly the same grades as people who sleep more than 8 hrs, but slightly better (d = .15) SAT/ACT scores. Ideally they would be comparing <4 hrs | 4 - 5 hrs | 5-7 hrs | 7-9 hrs | > 9hrs, but sometimes we can’t have nice things.
I did manage to find one article that argues that eight hours of sleep are essential to getting a high score, as individuals who get a full seven hours of sleep score 10% higher on tests than those who are sleep deprived. Calculating the difference between the two ends of a statistical distribution will overestimate the overall effect, as these comparison groups will differ in sleep quality by about ~2 standard deviations, so it’s not suprising that they found a moderate effect size.
Anecdotally, I slept 6-7 hours when I took the SAT a second time and 4-5 hours when I took the GRE a second time. I got good scores on both attempts, both of which were in line with how I did on the practice tests. The sleep deprivation I experienced during the second GRE attempt may have harmed by math score, but it definitely didn’t harm the verbal score. There may be between individual effects here at play, so poor sleep may have negative effects on some people but not others.
One mistake I made the first time I took the GRE was taking too many practice tests and not studying the test material itself. Taking practice tests makes you practice everything, which is inefficient, because there will be certain sections of the test that you will need to practice more than others. There are some test-specific things to be familiar with (e.g. time management, endurance), but these skills will be learned within ~2-3 practice tests.
Another sin that I have been guilty of is getting too hung up on poor scores. There is a degree of unreliability to these tests, so if you take them multiple times, you will probably bomb a section or two. Scott Alexander has a great article about being against individual IQ worries - he notes in it that the split-half reliability of IQ suggests a standard error of 3-7 points in most tests, but anecdotal evidnence of ~10-20 point discrepancies between tests is abundant. Part of this is because there is a longitudinal instability in IQ scores, which causes them to drop in reliability as the retest interval increases.
Emil Kirkegaard was able to replicate the (relatively) low reliability of IQ after a 20 year retesting interval in the Vietnam Experience Study:
Based on this evidence, the correlation between two IQ tests drops from 0.96 to 0.8-0.85 after 10-20 years. However the stability of general intelligence from 18 to 50 years old is roughly .95, so about ~50-75% of the changes in IQ scores across time reflect non-g variance. Beyond this, scholastic tests are a bit less reliable than full scale IQ tests, based on internal consistency/test-retest statistics (for reference, the split-half reliability of the WAIS-III is .98 and the reliability omega of the ASVAB in the NLSY is about .95).
As for things to actively do instead of avoid…
Practice. There are practice effects observed in the GRE (d = ~.2), the ACT (d= ~.3), SAT (d = ~.1), and IQ tests (d = .26). This is only for test-retest - I assume “true practice effects” that result from long training are even larger. The heritability of scholastic ability scores are probably lower than 80% - that leaves 20% of the variation as potentially gameable.
Stop practicing if you hit a ceiling on a certain task (e.g. reading comprehension, data interpretation). In basically every facet of life, whether it’s games or IQ tests, there is a certain point at which practicing is going to have no effect on ability. There are some people who believe that you can do anything if you practice for 10,000 hours, but my experiences playing games contradicts this. It is not that uncommon to see >1,000 hour accounts in video games that are stuck in ~60th percentile elo or even low elo.
For verbal tests, you usually hit your ceiling earlier, as they test less abilities than mathematical ones, which tend to test a wide variety of concepts. Because of this, you should be practicing the mathematical sections more, especially if you are not in high school. This may not be good advice for everybody though - if you are a math major who has read nothing in the past 2 years, then you should definitely practice the reading more.
Take the test again if you think you can do much better. Common sense, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people sit with the score they get, wondering what could have been.
Reading visual novels to increase your reading speed: download a visual novel (I recommend Fate/stay night or Steins;Gate), set the text reading speed to a speed that’s slightly faster than your natural reading speed, and then once you get used to that, increase it again. Once you get to a reasonably fast speed of reading where you still understand the text, keep it there. Once you’ve read at that speed for ~20 hours, you will start to notice a big difference in how quickly you naturally read.
To summarize:
Practice. Genes are important, but they are ceilings, not floors.
Try the visual novel trick. Worked for me, but maybe not for others.
Don’t overthink health bullshit.
Don’t overthink a “bad score”. Kind of funny that online anything <90th percentile is considered a bad score - I don’t think people would call <90th percentile worker “lazy” or “unproductive”.
DON’T BUY PRACTICE MATERIALS. Except for simulations of the real test - those can help you get comfortable with the format. Otherwise these tests can be practiced easily with free materials available online or on libgen.
338/340 GRE scorer here
for general prep, the most important thing is to be healthy and have an alert brain, so in the weeks leading up to it I just made sure to get lots of sleep and avoided weed
for quant, literally all you need to do is buy the ''5 Lb. Book of GRE Practice Problems'' and drill, drill drill. There are only so many question formats, and you can pretty easily memorize them all if you just put in the hours by drilling them
for verbal, same thing, all I did was use GRE flashcards which are free online and memorized every word by drilling, there are only so many words, and they are all in the flashcards
verbal flashcards + math practice problems is all I needed
It isn't exactly a good measure of fluid intelligence if you can game the test by memorizing it
Considering your intellectual output, your scores are shockingly low. Maybe I have been overestimating the importance of IQ.