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

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

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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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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

Try these GRE Sentence Equivalence practice questions from the 5lb. Book of GRE Practice Problems to test your Sentence Equivalence skills. These five problems start simple, but the last few are as complex as anything you’ll see in an official GRE Sentence Equivalence problem. Read more

You might think you know how to memorize GRE vocabulary. However, a lot of what we learned in school about memorization—and about learning—has turned out to be inefficient or outright incorrect. There are faster and easier ways to learn GRE vocabulary than just staring at flashcards or repeating the words over and over, and they aren’t all obvious! Here are our best science-based GRE vocabulary tips for speeding up your vocabulary acquisition. Read more

The GRE Verbal section is about more than just vocabulary and memorization. GRE Verbal also isn’t a bunch of subjective questions with no real right answer. Instead, it’s a challenging—and interesting—test of your reading, attention, English knowledge, and executive reasoning skills. Read more

Who Needs the GRE Reading Comprehension Passage Anyway?

Let me be clear, if you want to maximize your GRE Reading Comprehension score, you should read each passage, thoroughly and entirely, before trying any of the questions about it. Strategies like skimming the passage or reading the questions first tend to result in sub-par performances. In the name of honing your Verbal skills, though, I’m going to suggest you do something seemingly ludicrous: practice answering some GRE Reading Comprehension questions without reading the passages. Read more

There are two types of fill-in-the-blank vocabulary questions on the GRE: Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence. Text Completion questions ask you to fill in one, two, or three blanks with a single word; Sentence Equivalence questions ask you to fill in one blank with two words. Often, students think of these as the “synonym” questions, but that’s not entirely accurate; being too focused on looking for exact synonyms trips up some test takers. Others aren’t rigorous enough when looking for a pair. In this article, I’m going to discuss exactly what we’re looking for when we “pair” answers for Sentence Equivalence and what common traps we should avoid. Read more

In this article, GRE instructor Tom Anderson asks a smart question: is it better to sort of know a lot of GRE words, or to really know a few GRE words? It turns out that you’re better off if you learn fewer words, but really learn them well. If you don’t, here’s one way the GRE could trick you. Read more