Can’t get enough of Neil’s GRE wisdom? Few can. Fortunately, you can join him twice monthly for a free hour and a half study session in Mondays with Neil.

As a long-time instructor of all things standardized testing (GRE, GMAT, LSAT, SAT), I love reading books about math, logic, learning, skill acquisition, neurology, and psychology. In this blog series, I bring you book reviews and recommendations, as well as excerpts and summaries you can put into practice right away on your GRE journey.

Dr. John Medina is a developmental Molecular Biologist with “a lifelong fascination with how the mind reacts to and organizes information.” In his book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Home, Work, and School, Medina lays out 12 “rules”—one per chapter—that science has learned about the way the brain works, and gives (mostly) clear recommendations for what you can do with that information. Read more

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Your time is a limited commodity. Studying vocabulary for the GRE can be tedious and time-consuming, and worst of all…inefficient.

If you’re like most students, you flip through flashcards (either premade or hand-made) and quickly try to remember what was on the back. After a few dozen repetitions over a few weeks you probably remember many of them. But…you don’t retain that information for long, and you might not recognize the words when used in a slightly different context.

Vocabulary is a significant component of GRE verbal, but it’s not actually something that you should invest a significant portion of your time studying! That’s because there’s no way to determine which words you’ll see on test day – you might see a dozen of the words you studied, or you might not see any at all.

So, you want to learn as many words as you reasonably can between now and test day with the minimum time spent studying! Read more