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. Ready to take the plunge? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Persistence is, in most endeavors, an admirable quality—just not when taking the GRE. For this test, knowing when to give up on a problem, guess, and move on, is a crucial skill. It’s important to remember that this is more than just a test of math knowledge or reading skills; it’s also a test of how one makes decisions under pressure. 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. Crazy, right? Check out our upcoming courses here.

Let’s take a look at some of the most useful GRE vocabulary words. These words don’t look that important on their own, but they can reverse the meaning of an entire phrase or sentence! Get started by trying out this GRE Text Completion question: 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 my last article, I gave you some time-saving basic arithmetic to memorize and a few tools to calculate more efficiently, using a combination of your brain and your scratch paper.

Today I’m going to throw few fun mental math “tricks” your way. Again, you could always pop out your calculator or do long division and multiplication on your scratch paper, but learning to multiply numbers in your head can be a massive time saver, as well as a good way to double-check what you do put into the calculator. 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.

Word problems get a lot of hate from students. When you read the explanation for a tough GRE word problem, it’s easy to feel like the solution came out of nowhere. Maybe it makes sense now, but how were you supposed to figure it out on your own?

Fortunately, word problems really aren’t so bad—they’re just misunderstood. There’s a strategy for solving GRE word problems, just as there is for any other type of GRE Quant problem. Here’s a way to confidently solve any GRE word problem. 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.

Why am I thinking about an old spiritual guru, sitting on top of a mountain, eating steaks? It’s because I’m trying to remember the word rarefied. Sure, there are more mundane ways to remember this word, but I have my reasons. Namely, I’m trying to tie several meanings of “rarefied” into a single mnemonic sentence. 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.

On the GRE, you will never, ever, ever, ever have to average two speeds together. If a GRE Quant problem gives you two speeds (say, 40 mph and 60 mph), and you average them (ending up with 50 mph), you’ve just gotten that problem wrong. 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.

I recently had a great conversation about ratios with one of our MPrep GRE classes. It’s a tiny class, and only two students were there that day (hey guys!). When I shared a tricky ratio problem with them, both students had totally different, but equally reasonable, reactions to it. Here’s the problem: Read more