Using the Computer to Your Advantage on the GRE
The fact that the GRE is administered on a computer is tough for a number of reasons—you can’t mark up the passages on the Reading Comprehension sections, for instance. It can also be visually tiring to stare intently at a screen for four hours (though many of us are used to this from doing so at work all day).
But there are also reasons why taking a test on the computer can be a good thing. Let’s take a look.
Reason #1: You can move around among questions on the GRE more quickly than you could on a paper test.
At the top of your screen, you have buttons with arrows allowing you to skip questions, mark questions for review, and view the questions that you’ve marked. Any of these are doable with the click of your mouse, which is much faster than flipping through pages to find questions you skipped and marked on a paper test. So that’s a plus.
One word of advice, however—because it’s so easy to skip around and mark questions for review, it can be tempting to overdo it. You should certainly feel empowered not to do the questions in order, necessarily, and to skip ones that you feel are too difficult or that are going to be less than a good use of your time, but you should be thoughtful about the number of problems you mark for review. You are unlikely to have time to redo more than two or three questions max, so if you mark more than this to revisit, you’re putting yourself in a bind: You’ll return to the review screen and wonder which of the eight problems you’ve marked to prioritize…suddenly you’re clicking on problems to view them in order to figure out which to try. It gets messy and, ironically, time-consuming.
Reason #2: Your GRE scratch paper is wide and empty, and you can use as much of it as you like.
Unlike a paper test in which you’re likely squeezing your scratch work into the margins of the test questions, you have scratch paper that’s given to you before your test begins. It’s a set of bare pages stapled together—around two to five pages (I’ve heard of people getting both and everything in between)—and when/if you run out, you simply raise your hand to request more. You can use as much scratch paper as you like.
This is something you want to take advantage of. Here are ways that you can do so:
- Redraw geometric figures.
- Solve math problems in a systematic and orderly way, keeping your work neat so that you don’t lose track of your thought process (which can easily happen if you’re cramming it into test margins—but you don’t have that problem here!).
- Create “maps” of your Reading Comprehension passages by drawing a rectangle and jotting notes about the passage in the relevant parts of the rectangle so that you can easily find particular points later, as needed.
- Jot down “A B C D E” and cross out answer choices as you eliminate them.
My tip is to do your best to time any requests for new scratch paper for the 10-minute break in the middle of your test, or at least during one of the 1-minute breaks between sections, so that you’re not distracted/using up valuable time waiting for the proctor to bring over fresh paper during a section.
Reason #3: You can easily reference the GRE long passage while you’re answering all of the questions about it.
While you aren’t able to mark up Reading Comprehension passages on paper, which is certainly a con when it comes to the computer-based GRE, there is a silver lining. When you reach the “long” passage, which is a passage of several paragraphs followed by around 5-6 questions about it, you will need to click forward to move through the questions. The passage, however, remains on the left side of the screen while you do so. This means that you can refer back to it without having to flip the page back and forth like you would a paper booklet.
And if you’re thinking, “I’m supposed to look back at the passage?” Yes! Not for the global questions like “What’s the main idea?” and “What’s the author’s primary purpose?”, but for the detailed questions about particulars that you’re unlikely to remember perfectly based only on one read, you should plan to return to the passage to find and confirm your answers.
In sum, try not to be freaked out by the fact that you’re taking a test on a screen—you have scratch paper, as much as you need of it, and you have the skip and mark buttons at the top of the screen. Use these tools to make the test your own even though it’s on a computer.
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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!