Articles published in How To Study

Perfectionism is the Enemy of the GRE

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Perfectionism is the Enemy of the GRE by Tom Anderson

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.


Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?

Maybe you wouldn’t normally use that word to describe yourself, but be honest, didn’t the typo in the sentence above drive you at least a little bit crazy? Read more

Introducing the GRE Just Math™ Course

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Introducing the GRE Just Math Course by Manhattan Prep

You just need to learn GRE Math. Maybe you haven’t taken math since high school and just need a respectable Quant score to get into your target school. Or maybe you’re already pretty good at math, but your target school requires you to be great. No matter your starting point or goal score, we built GRE Just Math to get you where you need to be on the Math section of the GRE. Read more

How to Read a GRE Explanation

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - How to Read a GRE Explanation by Chelsey Cooley

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’re using the 5lb. Book of GRE Practice Problems, you’ve probably noticed that every single problem has a detailed explanation in the back of the book. They were written by our own Manhattan Prep instructors, who worked hard to keep them clear, realistic, and helpful.

But you know what? I sometimes wish those explanations weren’t in the book at all. Read more

Learn GRE® Math in a Day (or two)

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Learn GRE Math in a Day by Manhattan Prep

Need to crush the GRE to get into your dream grad program, but haven’t taken a math class since high school? Is algebra a foreign language to you? Does the mere thought of doing math trigger deep-seated trauma? Or maybe you’re not allergic to math, but your skills are rusty and you could use a thorough refresher. Perhaps you’re actually quite confident in your math abilities, but you want expert instruction to reach the highest level as quickly as possible.

We developed our Foundations of GRE Math workshop for anyone who wants to gain all the fundamentals of GRE math content and strategy as efficiently as possible—just one day, to be exact. Read more

Guessing on the GRE and Moving On

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Guessing on the GRE and Moving On by Cat Powell

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.


Persistence is, in most endeavors, an admirable quality—just not when taking the GRE. For this test, knowing when to give up on a problem, guess, and move on, is a crucial skill. It’s important to remember that this is more than just a test of math knowledge or reading skills; it’s also a test of how one makes decisions under pressure. Read more

Study Like an Athlete: What Competitive Running Taught Me about the GRE

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Study Like an Athlete: What Competitive Running Taught Me about the GRE by Tom Anderson

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.


Study Like an Athlete

The GRE is not just any other exam. The Quant section contains questions you ostensibly learned how to do in fourth grade—some of them on topics like even numbers and factor trees. Underneath that elementary veneer, though, there are often some challenging inferences you have to make. The GRE Verbal section also tests you on reading and processing an incredible swath of information: passages cover every topic from pre-industrial leisure practices to radiation patterns in the Crab Nebula. Because of this breadth of content and the quirky questions asked about that content, the GRE is an exam you should practice for rather than just study for. Think of it more like a performance and less like a test. Read more

GRE Vocabulary Words that Change the Whole Sentence

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - GRE Vocabulary Words that Change the Whole Sentence by Chelsey Cooley

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.


Let’s take a look at some of the most useful GRE vocabulary words. These words don’t look that important on their own, but they can reverse the meaning of an entire phrase or sentence! Get started by trying out this GRE Text Completion question: Read more

Mental Math Magic (Part 2)

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Mental Math Magic (Part 2) by Neil Thornton

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.


In my last article, I gave you some time-saving basic arithmetic to memorize and a few tools to calculate more efficiently, using a combination of your brain and your scratch paper.

Today I’m going to throw few fun mental math “tricks” your way. Again, you could always pop out your calculator or do long division and multiplication on your scratch paper, but learning to multiply numbers in your head can be a massive time saver, as well as a good way to double-check what you do put into the calculator. Read more

How to Solve Any GRE Word Problem (Really)

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - How to Solve Any GRE Word Problem (Really) by Chelsey Cooley

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.


Word problems get a lot of hate from students. When you read the explanation for a tough GRE word problem, it’s easy to feel like the solution came out of nowhere. Maybe it makes sense now, but how were you supposed to figure it out on your own?

Fortunately, word problems really aren’t so bad—they’re just misunderstood. There’s a strategy for solving GRE word problems, just as there is for any other type of GRE Quant problem. Here’s a way to confidently solve any GRE word problem. Read more

Preparing for the GRE: What the Test is Really About

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Manhattan Prep GRE Blog - Preparing for the GRE: What the Test is Really About by Cat Powell

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.


In the first session of each GRE class that I teach, I ask students which sections they see as strengths and which they see as weaknesses. Almost all students have a strong preference for either Quant or Verbal. Often, these preferences aren’t based in actual test experience—rather, they reflect the student’s sense of him- or herself as a “math person” or a “language person.” Read more