And what do they tell us about prepping for the GRE?

Students often ask me, “Where can I find the most difficult questions on the GRE?” In this blog entry, I’ll show you the top three hardest GRE Math problems, ranked by percent of students who got them wrong. Before we get there, I should say: you don’t need to correctly answer questions like these to get a very, very good score on the GRE. This is a test that favors accuracy and consistency on mid-range questions over the ability to get the very hard ones. One can nab a score in the 90th percentile or above without getting any of the very hardest GRE Math problems correct. In case you’re curious, though, this is what the hardest GRE Math problems look like. Each of these questions were correctly answered by fewer than 20 percent of GRE test takers.

Start the drum roll.

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Perhaps more than any other kind of studying for the GRE, vocabulary practice directly translates into one’s GRE verbal score. For those of you feeling less than enthusiastic about memorizing hundreds of esoteric vocabulary words, take heart: there’s some interesting research that shows your vocabulary continues to grow throughout your life. If you use your GRE study to turbocharge that process, these words will likely stay in your memory through to your eventual senescence. Maybe you’ll use this vocabulary to sound super smart. Maybe you’ll just use it to call out your pretentious friends when they’re showing off.  

One way or another, knowing lots of words is a powerful skill. In this entry, I’m going to share 5 quick tips for memorizing vocabulary for the GRE quickly, painlessly, and permanently.  

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Who Needs the GRE Reading Comprehension Passage Anyway?

Let me be clear, if you want to maximize your GRE Reading Comprehension score, you should read each passage, thoroughly and entirely, before trying any of the questions about it. Strategies like skimming the passage or reading the questions first tend to result in sub-par performances. In the name of honing your Verbal skills, though, I’m going to suggest you do something seemingly ludicrous: practice answering some GRE Reading Comprehension questions without reading the passages. Read more

Do you consider yourself a “math person?” Read more

As you may know, we open up the first session of our 8-session Manhattan Prep GRE Complete Course as a free GRE trial class for anyone to attend. What happens in a GRE trial class? Why bother attending one? I’m sure every class is a little bit different, but there are some things you can expect to see, as well as a few things you should make sure to look for. 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.

I’ve written before about how it’s healthy to think of GRE study more like an athletic event you’re preparing for and less like run-of-the-mill studying. If you study for the GRE by memorizing formulas and glancing at written explanations, you’ll likely get very little out of your study. 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.

If you’ve ever taken a GRE, you’ve encountered something like this:

This is a good ole GRE Quantitative Comparison question—a “QC” for short. They’re always the first questions you see on the test. And they always have the same answer choices. 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.

30 minutes of highly-focused study beats 2 hours of “half-studying.”

I’d like to share with you a little study mantra. This is something I firmly and absolutely believe to be true: “30 minutes of highly-focused study is far better than 2 hours of half-studying.” As much as one might try to make up for poor GRE study habits by slogging through a multi-hour weekend marathon session, it just doesn’t work. There are so many reasons to avoid such lengthy study sessions—increasing fatigue, impaired retention, general painfulness of sitting there for so long… 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.

Here’s a GRE math riddle:

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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.

I’m going to give you two options. Which do you think would be more beneficial for your GRE Verbal score? Read more