How to Get a Perfect Score on the GRE
A perfect score on the GRE would be a 170 on each the Quant and Verbal sections and a 6.0 on the Analytical Writing Measure. Perfect scores are incredibly rare—while getting a perfect score in just one of these sections would put you in or close to the 99th percentile for that section, getting a perfect score in all three makes you a unicorn. In other words, you absolutely don’t need to get a perfect score in order to get into your program. I feel confident making that blanket statement. But for all the would-be unicorns out there, below I break down what you can do to get a perfect score in all three sections.
GRE Essays: Should I Care?
As a GRE instructor, I’m often asked, “Do the essays matter?” The answer is that it depends.
5 Quick GRE Vocab Hacks
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.
Which Questions Should I Skip on the GRE?
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.
How to Review a GRE Vocabulary Question
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
How to Review a GRE Quantitative Comparison Question
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
Everything You Need To Know About Time Management, Part 1
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.
Everything You Need To Know About Time Management On The GRE, Part 2
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.
Top 10 Quick GRE Prep Tips
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.
GRE Verbal Tips: No Stories
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: