Mastering GRE math means challenging yourself to improve your executive reasoning, on top of re-learning math rules you may not have seen for years. It’s not always an easy process, but there are a few quick math tricks that might earn you some points!

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Quick: here’s an expression from a GRE math problem. How do you simplify it?

√2¹⁴+2¹⁷ 

As a long-time GRE teacher, I like collecting problems like these: ones that often reveal the math misconceptions we don’t even know we have! There are a lot of different wrong ways to simplify this expression. Try it out before you keep reading—then we’ll look at some other math myths and common mistakes, and how to avoid second-guessing on the GRE. 

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One of my guilty TV pleasures is a British quiz show called “The Chase.” I like to watch it on the spin bike—there’s something about seeing people with British accents stammer, panic, and forget the names of their own children that makes a hard workout seem a little shorter. And as a trivia show, it feels vaguely more educational than, say, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”. 

Plus, believe it or not, it illustrates one of the most important things you’ll learn while studying for the GRE: knowing yourself is more important than knowing the math. 

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Few things make us instructors happier than getting that glowing email from a student who has just achieved his or her goal score. While these students tend to have certain traits in common (a reasonable timeline, diligent studying, etc.), we’ve also noticed that successful students take many different paths to reach their goals. 

Recently, the MPrep Instructor Manager team set out to investigate what habits and practices lead to successful outcomes for our students, with the hope of inspiring others just setting out on their test prep journeys. We asked our instructor pool to nominate students, and then reached out to these students to conduct brief interviews. 

Today, we’ll be sharing one story from a recent student, with the hope that we’ll be able to continue sharing more of these profiles in the future.

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If you want to master the GRE, think like a scientist. Each practice text completion or sentence equivalence question you miss gives you two new pieces of data. When you put enough data together, you learn, grow, and improve.  Read more

When you miss a GRE Quantitative Comparison problem, it’s easy to feel like you’ve been “tricked” by the test. You know the saying “fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you?” On the GRE, it goes the other way. Getting tricked once is a learning opportunity. But if you’re getting tricked in the same way more than once, look at how you’re reviewing problems.  Read more

I haven’t picked too ambitious a title there, have I? Let’s see how we do! In this first part, we’re going to talk about how the timing works and what implications that has for studying and taking the test. In the second part, we’ll discuss practical strategies for time management training.

Time management is obviously an essential GRE skill, and one of the (many!) skills we need for this test is the ability to maintain an appropriate time position. Time position refers to the relationship between the number of questions that have been answered and the time we’ve taken to answer them.

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In the first part of this series, we discussed the scoring, per question timing, and reflecting on your results. If you haven’t already read the first part, do so now before you continue with this article. Today, we’re going to talk about our next three major timing strategies.

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Do you have any of these common GRE issues? Here are two tips for each: one quick move you can make right away, and one longer-term change to help you study in the future.

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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.

There is a very simple rule that I try hard to instill in all of my students. This tip will serve you well on all parts of the GRE verbal section. It will help you in that most dire of text completion conundrums — the two words that both seem to make the sentence make sense. It will help you in sentence equivalence when there are two oh-so-tempting pairs of answers, and you just can’t seem to judge between them. And most importantly, it will help you in reading comprehension, particularly in identifying the traps the test makers have so diabolically hidden for you. My GRE verbal golden rule:

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