Any answer to the “what’s a good GRE score?” question should come with a disclaimer. Do you want a good GRE score for a PhD program in medieval history, or for an EMBA at your state university? Do you have weak college grades but ten years of work experience, or are you a current student with a 4.0 GPA? The real question to ask is “what’s a good GRE score for me?”—and the simple answer is, a good score is whatever score will impress the programs you’re applying to! Read more

This post was written by GRE Instructor Tyler Johnson. Big news in the GRE world as ETS announces the first format changes since 2011! Details are still being released; we’ll update this post whenever new information becomes available.

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Studying for the GRE on your own? Load up your GRE study calendar right now—it’s time to get organized. Read more

The most common GRE vocabulary words are rare but reasonable. The vocab questions don’t test the simplest GRE Vocabulary words, like cat or go. They also don’t test the hardest GRE Vocabulary words, like conodont or acnestis. The words tested on the GRE fall between these two extremes. They aren’t words that you see every day, but you’ll eventually run into them if you read plenty of high-quality writing—which is one thing the GRE is testing for! Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Problems involving work and rates can be a problem for many test-takers, but with a clear method to set them up and a little clever plugging in, you can learn to knock them out efficiently and accurately. Read more

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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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.

You’ve been studying for the GRE for a while now, and you’ve taken at least two GRE practice tests. (If not, start with this article instead!) Last time, we started discussing how to review a GRE practice test at a high level. This time, we’ll go even further: you can learn something from every single question on your GRE practice test. Here’s how. 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.

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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If you’re wondering whether to take the GRE or GMAT, you’re probably getting ready to apply to business schools. In a lot of situations, it doesn’t matter very much which test you take! However, there are some critical differences between the two tests, and you don’t want to be surprised when it’s time to submit applications. Keep reading to learn how to make your GRE vs GMAT decision. Read more

The best way to get some GRE essay practice is to sit down and actually respond to some GRE essay sample prompts at home. Here are our favorite GRE essay sample prompts to get you started, along with some tips on how to write. For more, check out the Verbal Strategy Guide once you’re done! Read more