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.
What if I Don’t Have a Syllabus?
If you’ve already finished the program or if you bought the Strategy Guides and are studying on your own, now what do you do?
First, take a practice test (if you haven’t taken one recently) and figure out what your current strengths and weaknesses are. These will provide your roadmap for the next several weeks at least.
Second, pick up a book that corresponds with one of your weakness areas and start reading. If you haven’t read the book before, start with chapter 1; if you have, then you can go straight to whichever pages contain the material that you need to review.
If you see something and know that you don’t know it, or you feel rusty or otherwise weak with the material, start reading. Keep a notebook or a computer file handy in which you can create a summary of the major strategies you need to learn from this chapter. Keep blank flash cards handy on which you can write things that you need to memorize. When you feel comfortable with the material, quiz yourself by trying out the In Action problems at the end of the chapter. Check your answers and review the solutions after each problem.
Once you feel good about your work on the In Action problems, return to past GRE-format problems (from the Official Guide, from past practice tests, etc.) and try them again. Are you better now that you’ve reviewed this area? Your final test is to try new GRE-format problems under timed conditions. At any point along the way, you may return to your Strategy Guides if you realize that there’s something you still don’t know well enough.
What about the areas that are your strengths? We don’t want to ignore those. If you feel comfortable with a particular chapter, quiz yourself using some of the In-Action problems; try a variety, especially the higher-numbered problems, but you don’t have to do them all. If you struggle with any, return to the relevant areas of the chapter.
Then, you can graduate to some new GRE-format problems from the Official Guide (OG). For these, don’t do the problems one at a time. Instead, incorporate them into a mixed set of 5 or 10 questions that cover multiple chapters or books that you’ve been reviewing lately—or even add some random questions from the OG. The real test doesn’t group topics together or tell us what topics or question types we’re about to see! Finally, don’t forget to time yourself.
Review is Essential
Because you’ll be taking notes and making flash cards as you go, you’ll be setting yourself up to do future drills and review what you’ve learned. Make sure to come back to older notes and flash cards periodically; if you discover that you’re beginning to forget certain things, you’ll need to go back and review more carefully from the book. (The good news is that this review typically goes faster the second time around—you’re reminding yourself rather than learning it for the first time.)
The further you get into the Strategy Guides, the more your practice problem sets from the OG should include random problems mixed in. Make sure that you’re also giving yourself questions from the appropriate difficulty levels—you don’t want to do only easy questions if you’re finding them really easy. Nor do you want to do sets comprised only of really hard questions if you’re not ready.
Takeaways
1) Know your strengths and weaknesses. Use this knowledge to prioritize your study, either adjusting the syllabus if you have one, or setting up your own. Not sure what to prioritize? Talk to your teacher, if you have one, or post on our forums. Just remember that we need to know something about your strengths and weaknesses in order to advise you—so make sure you know yourself.
2) Generally speaking, if you don’t know certain facts, rules, or vocab words, you need to hit your books and start working on the flash cards. If you’re struggling with process, you will find some of what you need in the books, but you will also need to spend time doing practice problems and trying to get better at the overall process of working your way through a question.
3) Use the resources available to you—teachers, the forums, this blog, your friends! ?
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