How to Study for the GRE in 2 Days
So you’re taking the GRE in a couple of days and you have no idea where to start. It’s not an ideal situation, but it’s where you find yourself. What do you do?
GRE Study Tip 1: Take a practice test
First, take a practice test. You can take a free practice test on our website. If you aren’t scoring within several points of your goal score, you may want to consider pushing back your test. Do you have any flexibility with your test date? Even if programs request or require that you take the test by a certain date, sometimes there is some flexibility there, so it’s worth reaching out to ask in order to give you more time to study.
But there’s another important reason to take a practice test, which is that it shows you what you’re up against in terms of content (the math and verbal material that you’ll be tested on), timing (how long you have to answer the questions), and duration (it’s a long test, and you’ll need mental endurance).
GRE Study Tip 2: Learn the basic test structure, question types, and scoring method
Here are the most important things to know about the Verbal and Quant sections of the test: you should leave no blanks, and you should try to lay eyes on every question. This is because the problems are not ordered by difficulty, so you could very well see an easy question near or at the end of a section. Your score is based on how many questions you answer correctly, so you want to get to these questions.
In addition to understanding this basic aspect of scoring, you will want to find out how much you should “care” about your essay score. Some programs have expectations for the essay score and some don’t. Know how seriously you need to take it.
Finally, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the basic structure of the test—how long the sections are, how much time you have on them, and what question types you’ll see. This way you won’t be trying to get your footing as you’re taking the test, and most importantly, you’ll have a sense of timing so that the clock doesn’t run out when you’re on question eight of twenty. On average you will spend 1 minute 45 seconds per question on the Quant section and 1 minute 30 seconds per question on the Verbal section.
Knowing what the question types are—you can read about these in the GRE Official Guide or in our Math and Verbal Strategy Guides—will save you time and mental energy during the test, as you won’t have to read the instructions on the standard question types, for which the task is always the same (Quantitative Comparison on the Quant side, and Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence on the Verbal side).
GRE Study Tip 3: Learn basic strategies for the basic question types
For these predictable question types, you have some basic strategies that can take you a long way. It is worth spending some time learning these strategies, which you can find in our Math and Verbal Strategy Guides. For Quantitative Comparison problems, the strategy is what we call “picking numbers.” For Text Completion problems, it’s using clues to predict a fill-in. For Sentence Equivalence problems, it’s eliminating any answer choices that do not have a synonym choice.
Spending several hours learning, practicing, and testing yourself on these strategies is a valuable use of time for anyone who is trying to maximize the effectiveness of last-minute study.
GRE Study Tip 4: Use your practice test results to focus your study
Finally, with only two or so days to prepare you shouldn’t try to memorize 200 new vocabulary words or relearn all of the math you haven’t seen since high school. But that doesn’t mean you should completely disregard content.
Look over your practice test results for areas on which you can quickly brush up, your low-hanging fruits: focus first on any easy problems that you missed. Why did you miss these? What could you have done differently to get them right? Is there a simple geometry formula you’ve forgotten? Need to refresh yourself on how percentages work, or the meaning of the word “superfluous?”
GRE Study Tip 5: Get a good night’s sleep and take a snack
In cramming it can be very tempting to lose sleep or otherwise sacrifice health for the sake of study. Resist this temptation. You are much better off having had a good night’s sleep and/or having gone on your regular jog than staying up till 2 a.m. quizzing yourself on right triangles.
Finally, take a snack. You’ll want it at the break.
(And remember—if it doesn’t go as well as you hope, you can take it again in three weeks.)
RELATED: Managing GRE Anxiety Before Test Day
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Mary Richter is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Nashville, Tennessee. Mary is one of those weirdos who loves taking standardized tests, and she has been teaching them for 15 years. When she’s not teaching the LSAT or GRE for ManhattanPrep, she’s writing novels under the last name Adkins. You can find them wherever you buy books. Check out Mary’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here!