How To Use Your Strategy Guides
If you wanted to meet every neighbor on your block, how would you go about it? You wouldn’t re-introduce yourself to your best friends who live a few doors down, or to the busy-body who walks her dog up and down the street all day and knows everybody’s business (no thank you!). Rather, you’d make a list of the neighbors you don’t already know and go knock on their doors. The same is true for learning GRE content. You need to identify the material that you do not yet know, and the material that’s giving you trouble, and concentrate your efforts there.
Follow the Yellow-Brick Syllabus
If you’re taking a class right now or using one of the self-study packages, then we’ve already done a lot of the hard work for you. Your syllabus tells you what material to study from week to week. However, you should also prioritize based upon your own knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses. Don’t read every last sentence or do every last practice problem if you find a particular lesson really easy. Speed up! By the same token, take extra time, and possibly seek out extra resources or practice problems, in areas where you’re struggling.
If you’re taking a class right now, then you also have a teacher, so make sure to talk to him or her if you’re having any trouble prioritizing or want some ideas about additional resources.
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What To Read – And What Not To Read – On GRE Reading Comprehension Passages
Recently,we talked about how to read and take notes on a reading comprehension passage. We didn’t look at an actual example, though, so we’re going to do that today. If you haven’t already read the older article, read that first; then come back here to see the example.
The passage below is from the Manhattan Prep GRE CAT database (copyright MG Prep). If you are still using our exams and haven’t yet seen this passage, then you may want to wait until after you’ve seen the passage before you read this article.
My score dropped! Figuring out what went wrong
It’s always disheartening when we have a score drop, whether it happens on a practice test or (worst case scenario) on the real test. If this happens to you, the most important thing to do next is figure out why this happened. If you can figure out why, then you may be able to do something to prevent a score drop from happening again.
How to Analyze a Practice Problem
When we study practice problems, our overall goal is to master the problem we’re working on right now. What does mastery mean? It means that, when we see a future different practice problem that tests the same thing as this current practice problem, we will realize that the future problem has certain things in common with this current problem, and we will know what steps to take as a result—we will, literally, recognize what to do on the future different practice problem, a problem we’ve never actually seen before.
It’s necessary to get to this level of mastery because the problems we study will never be the actual problems we’re expected to do on the test. But we will see similar problems—problems that have something in common with problems that we’ve already studied. If we can recognize what to do, then we will be faster (which is always important on this test), and we will be more effective—we’ll be more likely to get it right because we’ll know that the method we’re using actually worked the last time we saw a similar practice problem.
This mastery we’re talking about—the ability to recognize what to do on a new, different-but-similar problem—comes from the analysis we do after we’ve already finished trying a new practice problem for the first time. So how do we do that?
How To Get The Most Out Of Your Study
A few months ago, the New York Times published an interesting article: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits. (Click on the title to read the original article.) We’ve been discussing it here at Manhattan GRE and I wanted to share this discussion with you.
How To Read A Reading Comp Passage
How to read? Surely, we all know how to read already! Right?
It turns out that the best way to read a passage on a standardized test is not the best way to read in the real world. So before I say anything else, I want to say this: use what we’re about to discuss for the GRE only. Don’t read this way once you actually get to grad school!
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In It to Win It
This is a little story of a crucial epiphany one of my students (and I) just had.
Recently, at the end of class, one of my students began asking questions about timing and guessing on test questions. He’s really struggling with the idea that he has to let some questions go and that he’s not going to be able to answer every last question correctly. I told him he’s not alone; most students have significant difficulty accepting this idea—and those who can’t accept it almost never reach their goal scores.