How Much Do I Have to Learn to Beat the GRE?
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Not as much as you might think. However, it’ll still take time, hard work, and a change in mindset. A lot of the learning you have to do to beat the GRE won’t look like what you’re used to. Sure, you’ll spend some time reading books and taking notes. But you’ll also need to study and think in ways that go against what you may have learned in school.
The GRE isn’t a perfect test. For instance, the research is split on whether it predicts how well you’ll do in graduate school. However, people who say that the GRE “doesn’t test anything” or “only tests how well you take tests” aren’t quite right, either. There are certain skills that, if developed, will consistently help you do well on the GRE. And these skills are learnable. One of them is the ability to use your content knowledge under pressure.
You don’t need to know very much content for the GRE—you can get everything you need from the Manhattan Prep GRE Strategy Guides. However, I often work with students who know the content but still aren’t scoring well. That’s where “overlearning” comes in. Picture every “GRE fact” as a point on the following diagram:
When you’re just starting out, there might be a lot of topics in the blue or purple areas. That’s fine—you don’t really “get it,” and you’re aware of that. However, once you start learning, you’ll move some topics into the green or orange areas. You might even move a few into the red areas.
A lot of my students take a practice test at this point, and realize that they aren’t doing that much better. They think to themselves, “wow, I must still have a lot to learn.” They might start to look into the more obscure GRE content: super-tough vocabulary, combinatorics, 3-dimensional geometry, and so on. And that’s the wrong move. You didn’t score poorly on that practice test because there’s something you haven’t studied yet. You scored poorly because, even though you “get it” now, the GRE isn’t a test of “getting it.” It doesn’t reward students who can understand a lot of very difficult material. It rewards students who can use a relatively small amount of relatively easy material, under very difficult, very stressful circumstances, with no external support.
Adding more and more skills into the green and purple areas won’t help you gain points. But that’s what you’re doing when you start studying the more complex stuff in hopes of improving a low score.
Instead, you want to take the skills that are already there, and move them into the red areas.
In class, we refer to this as “overlearning.” You’re studying things that you already know, sometimes things you already know quite well. You’re not doing it because you’re hoping to learn something new; you’re doing it in order to prepare yourself to perform under pressure. Don’t just study a topic until you “get it”—study it until it’s totally automatic.
That means you might find yourself studying topics that feel easy. You might start to feel like you aren’t learning anything. That’s not actually the case, though. Think about the last time you got an easy problem wrong on the GRE. You probably didn’t miss it because there was something you had never learned. You missed it because you didn’t perform well under pressure.
One important note: you can’t move a skill into the red area instantly. When you’ve first learned something, even if you feel confident about it, you probably won’t be able to move it up more than a few levels in one study session. That’s a good argument for revisiting old topics over and over. It’s also a good reason not to learn brand new content in the week before your official test. You might be able to add new material to the purple and green areas, but you’d be better off spending your time moving things from the orange area into the red ones.
Here are some ways to study GRE topics you already “get,” while keeping yourself interested:
- Give yourself longer sets of problems to do, and less time to do them in. If you can already factor a number or solve a quadratic—practice doing those things with a timer until you can do them in ten seconds flat.
- Try writing your own problems. Can you create harder or easier problems?
- Teach the topic to someone else. If you don’t have a study partner, enlist a friend or family member who isn’t studying for the GRE, or just pretend. If you can explain a topic well, you’re ready to use it on test day.
- Create a “cheat sheet” for the topic. Do as much of this as you can from memory. If you feel like you’re finished, flip through the Strategy Guide or the 5lb. Book chapter for the topic and check for points that you missed. Then add them in.
Now that you’ve checked out this article, make yourself a list of topics to revisit. Think about the things you already feel like you’ve learned. Can you learn them more deeply? Can you improve your performance in those areas in order to beat the GRE? Take a few days or a few weeks and focus on what you think you already know—the results might surprise you. ?
What are some GRE topics you have in your “green and purple areas”? What about your “red areas”? Comment below!
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Chelsey Cooley
is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington. Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170/170 on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here.