Preparing for the GRE: What You’ll Really Learn
In a way, preparing for the GRE is your first graduate school experience. It can be infuriating. It can feel completely pointless and utterly unfair. But it can also teach you lessons that have nothing to do with the content—lessons that, if you let them, may stay with you for the rest of your life.
What skills does the GRE test?
The GRE tests math, vocabulary, and reading. It doesn’t test those topics because they’re relevant to your career (especially the math part, for most of us). It tests them because math, vocabulary, and reading are convenient and tangible stand-ins for skills that are relevant to every graduate student, but that are much harder to test directly.
For example: the GRE tests attention.
As of 2020, the GRE is nearly four hours long, with only two short breaks. Taking the GRE tests your mental stamina. It also tests your ability to sustain intense focus on a particular question for a minute or two, then switch to a question that might be completely unrelated. That’s not a skill that you’re born with. It’s one that you’ve developed, to a greater or lesser extent, throughout your life; it’s also a skill that you can intentionally improve with practice. And attention is useful through graduate school and through your career.
The GRE also tests your ability to identify important information.
Every problem on the GRE includes critical clues. In any Reading Comp passage, some sentences are meaningless fluff, while others might state the main idea outright. Every Text Completion problem includes key words and phrases (“clues”) that point you to one, and only one, answer choice.
When you practice Quant problems, we recommend an approach called “When I see this, do this”: go back into the problem, spot each important clue, and assess what it was really telling you. Doing this requires that you distill the problem, separating the clues from the fluff. Practicing this trains you to see straight to the heart of whatever you’re reading, and to do so quickly. You’ll do a lot of reading in graduate school, and you’ll do even more skimming. When you study for the GRE, you’re learning to skim effectively, and learning the subtle hints that guide you to what’s really important.
How Studying for the GRE Changes You
You may be reading this article because you’ve been out of school for a while, and the GRE might be your first experience with focused studying in years. On the other hand, you may be in school right now! Regardless, studying for the GRE can push you to study more efficiently, and to learn more about how you learn and retain information.
There are thousands of vocabulary words that might be tested on the GRE; you should definitely learn at least the five hundred most essential ones. There are both efficient and inefficient ways to learn five hundred words. Spaced repetition is the most efficient way we know of, but it isn’t just for vocabulary. Learn this method while you’re studying for the GRE, and you can use it years later, anytime you need to retain a lot of new information quickly.
Studying for the GRE is a chance to practice accountability and organization. Come up with a study calendar method that inspires you. When you discover something that works, use it the next time you have to organize a long-term project.
As we get older, the invitations to deeply learn about something new get less and less frequent. The GRE is one of those invitations. And since the GRE is an aptitude test, it not only invites you to learn about a topic (math, vocabulary) but also to learn new skills (problem-solving, skimming). Take advantage of this invitation to become better about learning. Take note of what works for you and what doesn’t. The study methods that worked best in school may no longer be the right ones for you; you might discover things you never knew about how your own brain learns. That knowledge won’t go to waste.
Being a Good Test-Taker
To succeed on the GRE, you need to become a “good test-taker.” You’ve probably heard that phrase before, but how often have you deeply explored what it means?
A good test-taker strikes a difficult balance between caution and boldness. On the GRE, you need to get as many answers right as possible to get a good score. However, you don’t have enough time to deal with every problem meticulously. The GRE forces you to strike a balance on two levels.
When you’re doing an individual problem on test day, you may have to walk away from it before you’re completely satisfied. Taking the GRE forces you to develop your “meta-reasoning” skill: the skill of figuring out how likely it is that your answer is right, and knowing when to be satisfied with an answer that’s likely enough.
You also need to choose your battles in a broader sense. You can’t devote your full time and attention to every problem on test day, given the time limit. So you’ll have to get better at figuring out, at a glance, whether you’re likely to get a problem right (in which case it’s worth trying) or whether a problem is likely to lead you down a rabbit hole (in which case you’re better off with a quick guess). Educated guessing, by the way, is another skill you’ll learn!
In this sense, a good test-taker is also a good reasoner. A good test-taker can tell what’s worth bothering with, and what just isn’t going to lead anywhere. And those are skills you’ll need in graduate school, and skills you’ll need even more in your career.
A good test-taker has self-awareness and accepts their abilities for what they are, while still striving to be better. A great way to underperform on the GRE is to “punch above your weight.” If you go into the test intending to get every problem right, you’ll stall out as soon as you hit a super-tough problem, waste a ton of time, and end up being forced to rush through the easier stuff. So, a good test-taker goes in with an honest awareness of what they’re able to achieve, and a willingness to give up on a certain number of questions in order to maximize their overall score. A good test-taker is a good strategic planner. So is a good graduate student!
Think Like a Scientist
Unless you’re one of those lucky souls who never struggles with the GRE at all, you’re going to experience defeat as part of the preparation process. You’re going to run into challenging topics and disastrous practice tests. There will be days where you just can’t seem to remember anything.
Perhaps the most important thing the GRE can teach you is to treat these experiences the way a scientist treats an experiment. When your experiment doesn’t prove your hypothesis, that isn’t a failure. It’s evidence. You’ve learned that either the hypothesis was incorrect, or the experiment wasn’t correctly designed. And so you design a new experiment, or come up with a new hypothesis, and you carry on. A scientist who responds to failure by shutting down and giving up—or by trying the same thing over and over, hoping for the results to change—is a poor scientist.
The GRE can teach you something about the scientific mindset. When you fail, you’re learning. In fact, you learn more from failure than from success. Respond to your GRE failures with patience and curiosity, not with anger, frustration, or sadness. Analyze what went wrong: did you study the wrong material? Did you take the test itself ineffectively? And keep moving. The GRE doesn’t measure your worth. It measures how well you’ve demonstrated certain skills at a certain moment of time: skills that you can both strengthen with practice, and learn to demonstrate more effectively.
The GRE isn’t a perfect test! It can’t tell you for sure whether you’ll fail or succeed in graduate school. But it can teach you a lot, if you let it. Studying for the GRE is a chance to become a better graduate student—more patient, thoughtful, attentive, and aware of your own strengths and weaknesses—before you ever apply to schools.
KEEP READING: How to Study for the GRE
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Chelsey Cooley
is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington. Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170Q/170V on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here.