The Last Week before Your GRE: What to Do
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It’s the last week before your GRE! What should you do this week to maximize your odds of a great score?
Your goal is to do the best you can with what you have. Don’t question whether you’ve studied enough. That leads to anxiety, and anxiety leads to behaviors that won’t help you on test day. Suppose that you decide, with one week to go, that you need to start learning Combinatorics. Unfortunately, one week is only enough time to move Combinatorics into your “purple zone” or “green zone”. Topics in those two zones won’t help you very much on test day.
That doesn’t mean you should be fatalistic about the test! You can absolutely improve your score during the last week before your GRE. But, think about it like this. At every level of knowledge and ability, there’s a whole range of different scores you could get on the GRE. At the low end, there’s the score that you’ll get if you get food poisoning the morning of your test. In the middle, there’s your “average” score—the score that most people with your ability level will end up with. But there’s also a high end of the range, that represents the score you’ll earn if you’re at the very top of your potential. Here’s how you get yourself there.
1. Take a (cognitive) load off.
Driving while using a cell phone is dangerous. That’s true even if you’re using a hands-free device. It’s not just about having your hands off of the wheel or your eyes off of the road—it’s about our limited mental processing ability. Whenever you’re using your cognitive resources for one thing (having a phone conversation), you’re neglecting something else (driving safely).
How does that apply to the last week before your GRE? Well, for peak GRE performance, you’ll need all of your mental resources. That means not expending those resources on:
- Calculating how much time you have left in the test
- Worrying about whether you’re going to get a parking ticket
- Thinking about whether you’ll keep or cancel your score
- Figuring out how to use the on-screen calculator
The more of these things you handle during this week, the more mental capacity you’ll have available during the test. Memorize your GRE timing benchmarks. Take a trip to your testing center and check out the parking and traffic situations. Do some research on your target schools and decide on your threshold for canceling a score. Read the ETS’s page on using the GRE calculator. (Ever wondered what those C and CE buttons were for? Learn it now, and don’t worry about it on test day!)
2. Warm up (but don’t wear out.)
I already mentioned that you shouldn’t try to learn new material this week. However, there are two things you should keep working on until shortly before your test. First, improve your ability to use what you already know. My favorite way of doing this is to solve problems that I’ve already done before, with a timer. If you’ve been keeping a problem log, now is the time to go through and review the entire thing! It’s also a great time to review old vocabulary flashcards. Make sure you still remember all of the words you learned weeks or months ago.
Second, you can get faster and more comfortable with the basics. The last week before your GRE is a great time to do simple math drills, for instance. Try some of the drills from Khan Academy, or play the arithmetic game at http://arithmetic.zetamac.com, or even look up some middle-school math worksheets to fill out. See if you can list all of the prime numbers up to 100, or try to factor all of the numbers up to 100 as quickly as you can.
It’s up to you whether you want to keep learning new vocabulary right until your test date. You won’t get the full benefit of spaced retrieval. But, you could still learn 30 words or so during the final week. Just don’t let it interfere with the more important work of reviewing and warming up.
Don’t take a practice test this week—and definitely don’t take one the day before your real test. (The only exception is if you’ve never taken a practice test before, in which case you should take one as soon as possible.) In fact, consider the day before your test to be part of your warmup. Spend a little time studying, but don’t do anything too strenuous—and focus on resting and mentally preparing yourself. On the morning of your test, it’s fine to do a few easy problems, or take one last look at your problem log. But remember that the GRE is a long test, and you’re going to be worn out by the end. There’s no reason to wear yourself out prematurely, and it might cause a drop in your performance on the later sections.
3. Don’t miss the ones that you could get right.
If you work on new problems during the last week before your GRE, do longer, timed sets of mixed problems. (This is a good time for the Practice Sections chapters of the 5lb. Book of GRE Practice Problems.) Why? This will help you with two crucial test-day skills: decision-making and avoiding careless mistakes. Think about it this way: on the GRE, there are problems you can avoid missing, and problems you can’t avoid missing. There’s no way to avoid missing some GRE problems—when you see one that’s just too tough, the best decision is to make a guess and keep moving. When you do a timed set this week, your goal is to make that choice quickly and realistically, so you’ll be ready to make it on test day. There are also some GRE problems that you might miss for avoidable reasons, such as misreading the question, mixing up two words, or ignoring a critical part of the sentence. One of your goals this week is to prepare yourself to avoid those careless mistakes. Turn a critical eye to your mistakes, and train yourself to avoid the most common ones.
Okay, are you ready? Here’s your final-week checklist:
- Memorize your GRE timing benchmarks.
- Plan your trip to the testing center.
- Think of all of your last-minute questions (how do I use the GRE calculator?) and research the answers.
- Review all of your vocabulary words one last time.
- Do a few sets of arithmetic drills.
- On two or three different days, do a mixed 20-problem set out of the 5lb. Book of GRE Practice Problems.
- Review your GRE problem log.
- The day before your test, and the morning of your test, relax and focus on mindset! If you’ve followed these instructions, you’ve done everything right—you’re prepared to get a score that reflects the best of your abilities.
Good luck out there! Let us know how it goes, and let us know if you have any other suggestions for last-minute GRE preparation. ?
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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.