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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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?
GRE Pacing and Strategy: The Review Screen
One of the highly touted features of the Revised GRE is the ability of students to navigate freely within a test section. While the old GRE was (and the GMAT is) a Computer Adaptive Test, which required students to complete the test without skipping a question, the Revised GRE is a Section Adaptive Test, which allows students to skip questions and analyze the overall section on a review screen. But, as great as this feature sounds, you shouldn’t skip around. On the GRE, time is extremely valuable. Time spent hunting for an easy question is time wasted.
That is not to say the review screen isn’t a boon; it can be. Pacing is an extremely important part of GRE strategy, and the review screen can help you with that.
By test day, you should have an idea of how much time you will spend on each question. Here are some good guidelines for how much time you can afford on each problem type: Read more
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.
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.
Decision Fatigue on the GRE
A few months back, the New York Times published this fascinating article on the subject of decision fatigue. The article became a big topic of conversation here in the Manhattan GRE office. If you don’t have time to read the full article, I will give a quick summary: the more decisions a human makes in a row, the less will-power that person will have after each successive decision—this phenomenon is called decision fatigue (note: this is a vast oversimplification of the article, so you should give it a read if you have time). The test subjects weren’t asked to make big decisions—no marriage proposals, no career changes, no forced choice between Kirk and Picard—just simple everyday choices, such as what color of china they would prefer, or what specifications they would like in a new computer. The study found that making decisions, even small inconsequential ones, can significantly deplete a person’s willpower.