Using GRE Practice Tests Strategically
There’s something very alluring about practice tests. They feel productive. They seem like they’re giving you an upper hand on “the real thing”. And there’s always that secret hope that this time you’ll knock it out of the park and you can finally stop studying.
Don’t get me wrong; I love practice tests. I love them as a teacher, because they help me assess my students’ progress. And I love them as a student, because I know where I stand. But more and more, I find myself having to caution students about using practice tests effectively.
Often times, I see students using practice tests in ways that are completely unproductive. Since your time is precious and you ideally want to get the most improvement possible for whatever time you invest, I’d like to give you my two cents on using practice tests effectively.
Take a test before you start studying.
This is one practice test that’s completely efficient and insanely valuable, and yet it’s the one students are most likely to skip. Many students skip the practice test at the beginning of a course or before they start studying. Sometimes, they skip it because they are afraid of what the results will be. Other times, they know the result won’t be good enough for their school of choice, so it seems pointless. I also often hear students say that they don’t want to “waste” one of their practice tests until they have started studying.
I feel comfortable saying that, without exception, these are all bad reasons to skip the first practice test. You have to know where you’re starting so that you can know what’s working. Taking a practice test at the beginning of your studies will give you a baseline from which to measure your progress and an invaluable exposure to the exam to frame your studying. It wouldn’t be a waste even if you couldn’t ever take it again – but since you can, and since you’re likely to take it differently after weeks or months of studying, there’s absolutely no reason to skip the first practice exam. (If you’ve very recently taken a real exam, that’s a perfect substitute for an initial practice test.)
Take tests in a real way.
If you have to caveat your test score by saying anything that starts with, “I got XYZ score on my practice test, but…”, you’re not using your practice tests as efficiently as you could be. So let me lay it out as directly as I can.
Don’t take your practice tests untimed. Don’t take a big break in the middle of your practice test. Don’t pause it a bunch of times. Don’t take it when you have an important business meeting, or a lot of interrupting phone calls, or a computer that’s going to crash. Don’t take practice tests from an irreputable source (such as any website you haven’t heard of before). Don’t take only the math section. Don’t take it when you’re exhausted, or hung over, or sick, or preoccupied. Don’t take it after a long work day.
See the idea? You don’t want to have any mitigating circumstances that explain why the score is lower or higher than it should be; you want the real deal. I know that life gets in the way, and sometimes you can’t avoid interruptions or frustrating circumstances. But if you make your best efforts to make the test a true assessment of your abilities, you’ll get the most out of the information that a practice test has to offer, which is the whole point of taking one in the first place.
Take tests for strategic reasons.
Here are three good reasons to take a practice test: to assess what you currently know (and therefore how well your studying is working), to practice your test-taking strategies (such as timing and guessing), and to identify key areas to study going forward.
At the risk of being facetious, here are the other good reasons to take a practice test: none.
Outside of practicing your test-taking strategies, practice tests are not useful for actually improving your test score. Practice tests are a very inefficient way to learn content. If you were learning to play the piano, would you learn it by trying to play performance pieces once, one after another? Of course not. You’d work in-depth and with repetition on exercises that would serve as the building blocks of performance pieces. And since the GRE is a skill-based test, you should approach it the same way.
A more efficient use of your time would be to work through your study material, then take a practice test to see where you stand. Give it your best shot, review the problems you missed, and then look at the data. What areas are causing the most trouble? Where would improvement help the most? Target those areas in your studies, and then take another practice test when you feel that you’ve improved in those areas. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Keep Fighting the Good Fight.
I hope that you don’t find this post discouraging. If you’ve already taken a lot of practice tests, that’s fine. Practice tests are useful, and you’ve probably been learning along the way. But my goal is to help you design an efficient study plan so that you get the most benefit per hour invested, and I generally feel that students get the most benefit when practice tests are used consistently, infrequently, and strategically. When you treat practice tests as what they are, assessments rather than teaching tools, you tend to get the most return for your efforts. And who doesn’t want that?