You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

People study for the GRE in different ways. Some people spread their studying out over time, taking 10-15 minutes every few days and studying for several months or more. Others condense their studying into a more limited amount of time.

When I was first studying for the GRE, I was lucky enough to get to doing it during six weeks I had off over a summer. During this time, I mainly spent my time doing two things: learning vocabulary (using flashcards) and taking practice tests.

I spent so much time studying for the GRE during this time that I began to have dreams about exponents, ratios, and number properties! Sometimes they were nightmares, in which I imagined myself confronted with an unsolvable problem, filled with a growing sense of dread as the clock counted down to 0.

Other times, however, I had dreams that filled me with a sense of confidence. In these dreams, I was confronted with a problem, and, even before I knew what the answer to the problem was, I knew something even more important: I understood what the problem was asking me to show. Read more

Taking the GRE for your business school application? You’re in luck. Each month, we are featuring a series of MBA admission tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

By being proactive and doing some advanced planning, aspiring MBA candidates can remove a great deal of stress from the business school application process and substantially bolster their candidacy. We have several big picture recommendations for applicants to consider to help them be as competitive and prepared as possible when admissions season begins in earnest.

Few candidates realize that starting to visit campuses as early as late winter or early spring is a great way to learn about and establish interest in specific schools. Campus visits are not just opportunities for you to “register” with a program’s admissions committee but are also a time for you to gain a deeper, firsthand understanding of various academic methodologies and social environments. Such visits can also prepare you to write far more targeted and informed essays when the time comes. After all, you can only learn so much about a school from its website. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

There are four reasons to miss a GRE Sentence Equivalence problem. Here are three of them:

• You misread the sentence.
• You didn’t know all of the vocabulary words (or remembered a word incorrectly).
• You were short on time and the problem looked tough, so you guessed and got unlucky.

These are all things that you can address with practice. (Check out our Text Completion & Sentence Equivalence Strategy Guide for ideas!) However, we won’t be talking about them here. Instead, let’s look at a fourth reason to miss a GRE Sentence Equivalence problem:

• You fell for a trap.

Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

One of the most common mistakes many students make on the Quant section of the GRE is to misread percent questions, especially ones that ask you to calculate percent change (i.e. increase, decrease, more, less, greater, discount, or profit). You can fix this issue with a bit of practice, but it requires some careful reading on your part. Read more

Each week, we are featuring a series of MBA admission tips from our exclusive admissions consulting partner, mbaMission.

The MBA application process is really more of a marathon than a sprint, but many candidates make things harder on themselves than necessary by ignoring certain tasks until late in the game. Here we will cover some pragmatic and practical steps you can take to avoid feeling rushed and to ensure that all the parts of your MBA application are as strong as you can make them before you submit. With some foresight and planning, when the schools start releasing their essay questions in June and July, you will be able to focus solely on them, without the distraction and demands of some of the other parts of your MBA application.
Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Think about your least favorite GRE vocabulary word. You know the one—every time you see it in your flashcards, you get that sinking feeling of dread. You always get this one wrong. You know it’s important, but for some reason, it just won’t stick in your head.

Okay, do you have a word in mind? Let’s conquer it—right here and now. Read more

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If you’re in college, graduate school might sound like a faraway, almost ominous concept. Do you have a dream grad school that you want to attend one day? Do you know what it takes to get into a top grad school? Have you heard about the GRE, or Graduate Record Examination?

It can definitely be an overwhelming experience, but it doesn’t have to be. If you give yourself enough time to prep the right way, the test starts feeling less scary and easier to understand. You’ll stop breaking into a sweat at the sight of an exponent or a sentence with five commas, and you’ll feel your confidence building. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Here’s a hard problem that I used to teach in session 1 of our GRE course (my poor students! This was a rough intro to GRE math.)

If you’d like to, give yourself a minute or two to try this (but don’t bang your head against it for too long). If you’re thinking wow, I have no idea what’s going on here—well, it’s a good thing you’re reading this. And even if you do feel comfortable with this problem, it might be worth reading further to see how the techniques used to solve this are more broadly applicable in GRE Quant. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

I have been fortunate enough to sit on a grad school admissions committee as part of my training as a graduate student in social psychology. This view from the inside gave me some interesting information about what the GRE means to the most important people: the ones reading your application.

To start off, it’s important to understand exactly how admissions committees work. Admissions committees, especially for small programs, are not as organized or as consistent from year to year as you might think. This is because there is often a high degree of turnover in the grad school admissions committee staff from year to year. While with business schools there may be a fully-staffed admissions committee with only a handful of academics sitting in, in other programs the admissions committee consists entirely of professors and graduate students, many of whom are serving for their first time. What this means is that there is no secret formula for a winning application, since the committees change drastically from year to year.

However, there are certain aspects of your application that are sure to get you noticed by the grad school admissions committee. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

After working with thousands of students, I’ll admit: Reading Comprehension is my least favorite subject to teach. Why? Because unlike Quant, it doesn’t have concrete rules to apply, so it can be harder to find ways to help when students are struggling.

I have found, though, that many students who struggle with GRE Reading Comprehension aren’t actually struggling with the “reading” or the “comprehension” part (unless they struggle with English skills generally). No, the passages – though dense and often boring – are mostly ok. It’s answering the questions that’s a struggle!

RC questions can seem vague, and the answer choices can feel like a sphinx’s riddle. Often 2 or 3 answers choices may seem equally right, or maybe none of them seem right! So what should you do? Read more