You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

I’ve written before about how it’s healthy to think of GRE study more like an athletic event you’re preparing for and less like run-of-the-mill studying. If you study for the GRE by memorizing formulas and glancing at written explanations, you’ll likely get very little out of your study. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

30 minutes of highly-focused study beats 2 hours of “half-studying.”

I’d like to share with you a little study mantra. This is something I firmly and absolutely believe to be true: “30 minutes of highly-focused study is far better than 2 hours of half-studying.” As much as one might try to make up for poor GRE study habits by slogging through a multi-hour weekend marathon session, it just doesn’t work. There are so many reasons to avoid such lengthy study sessions—increasing fatigue, impaired retention, general painfulness of sitting there for so long… Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Around this time of year, as people recover from the holidays and contemplate winter vacations, I tend to get a lot of questions from students anxious about taking a GRE break. Will a week- or month-long vacation hurt their scores? Will they forget all the new math content they’ve learned? Should they bring their 5lb Book of GRE Problems on the plane with them?

The short answers: no, no, and you don’t need to, it’s available as an e-book. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Last time, we discussed how to learn more about the GRE and how to prepare yourself to study efficiently during your first two weeks. Now, let’s look at a few more sample study sessions. How you study matters—and that can make the difference between an okay GRE score and a great one. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Practice tests are like cupcakes. Having one or two is great, but if you go through the entire batch too quickly, you’ll end up regretting it.

Before you decide how many GRE practice tests you’ll take, let’s talk about why we take practice tests. There are two good reasons to take a practice GRE: Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Studying for the GRE might be one of the hardest things that you’ll ever do. It may even be harder than some of your graduate school classes! Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Do you get the test-day jitters? Even when you’re taking a practice GRE? So do I, even though I’ve been taking the GRE for eight years. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years about how to stay calm during the GRE and get a great score. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Study Like an Athlete

The GRE is not just any other exam. The Quant section contains questions you ostensibly learned how to do in fourth grade—some of them on topics like even numbers and factor trees. Underneath that elementary veneer, though, there are often some challenging inferences you have to make. The GRE Verbal section also tests you on reading and processing an incredible swath of information: passages cover every topic from pre-industrial leisure practices to radiation patterns in the Crab Nebula. Because of this breadth of content and the quirky questions asked about that content, the GRE is an exam you should practice for rather than just study for. Think of it more like a performance and less like a test. Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.

In the first session of each GRE class that I teach, I ask students which sections they see as strengths and which they see as weaknesses. Almost all students have a strong preference for either Quant or Verbal. Often, these preferences aren’t based in actual test experience—rather, they reflect the student’s sense of him- or herself as a “math person” or a “language person.” Read more

You can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

It’s okay to make mistakes on the GRE. You can miss plenty of problems and still get a great score. However, it matters why you make those mistakes. Miss a problem because you don’t know how to solve it? That’s totally okay (as long as you don’t waste too much time). Miss a problem because you added two and three and got six? That’s a problem, and here’s how to fix it: stop trying to go fast. Read more