If you’re in the midst of preparing for the GRE general test or just getting started with your studying, you might be wondering how to study for the GRE effectively.
In this article, expert GRE tutor, David Baird, lays out the most effective way to get ready for the GRE exam—in just three simple GRE study steps. In fact, the approach explained here is based on the official Menlo Coaching GRE Curriculum.
Most test takers spend more time on the GRE than they need to. By working with the right study materials (official GRE test questions, full-length practice tests, and ideally, a private GRE tutor), you can achieve your target GRE score in as little as 10 weeks.
Smart GRE preparation involves three steps:
Follow these steps to make your GRE study more efficient—and win acceptance to better graduate programs!
Before you can focus on improving the baseline abilities described above in the context of the GRE exam, you must address your weaknesses in the test content. This is the basic starting point for GRE prep that will help you achieve your target score and is one area in which self-study creates problems: you need well-made GRE-specific drills that focus on exactly the skills required for the exam.
The official resources only provide a limited number of these types of organized drills, so to truly become fully trained in the exam content, you will need to use a much broader-based high quality GRE curriculum to help you quickly fill in your knowledge gaps. Once you complete this initial refresh, you will continue to increase your fluency even more in the next steps.
If you don’t have complete mastery of the underlying knowledge, you create a hard ceiling for the score you can achieve.
For many GRE takers, the underlying content on the exam is not much of a challenge—so make sure your content knowledge and fluency won’t hold you back!
If you find that you suffer from a distinct content weakness (statistics and vocabulary are two common areas of deficiency), you may need to spend extra time at the beginning of your GRE preparation process addressing those content issues.
Once you have refreshed all the core content knowledge (this goes quickly for most people), then the fun begins!
For each content family, there are particular types of questions that appear repeatedly and contain important patterns. Studying for the GRE is not about learning content in a vacuum—it is about the application of content to solve difficult problems. Most of the difficulty lies in unpacking the question to see what knowledge you need to apply.
To do this properly, you should use a highly-organized self-study curriculum, in which you do many of the same types of problems multiple times.
Many GRE takers who choose to self-study fall into a common trap: they use Official GRE practice questions in a random, non-strategic manner. Working in this way will cause you to miss important patterns and opportunities to employ time-saving techniques—this is also one reason people receive lower scores on test day despite getting the answers correct in their own self-study.
When using Official GRE questions, make sure to group the problems by content. Numerous tutors and test prep companies provide a free categorization of problems from the official resources in different online forums.
Quality instruction will greatly speed up this essential component of the GRE preparation process. With the wrong instructor, you might find that you get the correct answers to the practice questions, but you struggle to achieve your target score on test day.
With an effective GRE tutor, you will:
While you might eventually develop similar strategies to study for the GRE and recognize key patterns on your own, you will likely take much longer and still overlook some critical test elements.
The goal of this step is to empower you to properly deconstruct every practice question that you miss or solve inefficiently and learn from it. Otherwise, your GRE score will typically not improve much, even when you have completed 1000+ questions. Why? You don’t truly understand the reason you got the question wrong, so you don’t make the necessary improvements and adjustments to strategy, approach, and mindset.
If you choose to self-study, focus most of your time on getting the proper takeaways from each question.
At Menlo Coaching, we require our GRE students to keep detailed error logs to ensure that any incorrect answers are learned from and improved upon.
So… you have refreshed and mastered most of the core content. You have learned how to effectively deconstruct GRE practice questions, and you are able to quickly recognize where the true difficulty lies in most problems. Are you ready for the exam? Not just yet.
While refreshing content and learning how to apply that knowledge, it is difficult to also focus on exam pacing and other best practice test-taking skills. But the right pacing and test-taking skills, such as following the optimal question order, are vital to achieving a high GRE score on test day. This means that once you have covered main content areas sufficiently, the next step would be to complete multiple timed practice sets using official practice questions and then thoroughly reviewing your performance on these practice sets.
You can study by yourself fairly well during this phase, as you are simply doing timed sets and practice exams to work on both test-taking skills and pacing.
A tutor can help you better analyze your overall performance, but you should be able to make proper adjustments if you take the time to carefully unpack each timed set and practice exam.
Throughout this process, you will recognize any ongoing weaknesses, and you will master the process of completing a certain number of questions in a defined period—especially by running through a full GRE practice test.
You will become better than most test takers at deciding when taking an educated guess is the smart decision and when being a little stubborn, such as when you feel you can eventually get the question correct, is the better approach.
The third step in studying for the GRE culminates with a series of official practice exams that indicate accurately where you stand and where you still need some work.
Remember: unless you have zero previous experience with the GRE, it does not make sense to take on a practice test too early in your preparation process as there are only 5 official practice tests available for GRE students! The only way you get faster and better on the exam is by improving your content knowledge and your strategic approach to problems.
The approach and content involved in your GRE exam preparation should be one component of an overall GRE study plan.
In planning your schedule, pick a smart time frame and set aside roughly 10 weeks of test prep time. In those first five weeks, refresh all the underlying exam content and learn how to properly deconstruct and attack GRE problems of each type—steps 1 and 2.
Following that initial period, begin step 3. Do a lot of timed practice sets and work through a full practice test regularly. Unless the practice tests are way off from your target score, when test day comes, you should be ready to face the actual GRE exam head-on, reach your target score, and be done with the GRE forever!
The Menlo Coaching 10-Week GRE Study Plan template offers a structured starting point from which to build your quantitative reasoning, verbal reasoning, and analytical writing skills while strengthening your strategic approach to the exam.
Are you ready to boost your GRE prep today? Speak with a Menlo Coaching GRE tutor today to achieve your target GRE score in just 10 weeks!
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