Undergrads get our best prices on classes, up to $400 off. Click here to find out how!

If you’re in college, graduate school might sound like a faraway, almost ominous concept. Do you have a dream grad school that you want to attend one day? Do you know what it takes to get into a top grad school? Have you heard about the GRE, or Graduate Record Examination?

It can definitely be an overwhelming experience, but it doesn’t have to be. If you give yourself enough time to prep the right way, the test starts feeling less scary and easier to understand. You’ll stop breaking into a sweat at the sight of an exponent or a sentence with five commas, and you’ll feel your confidence building. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

I have been fortunate enough to sit on a grad school admissions committee as part of my training as a graduate student in social psychology. This view from the inside gave me some interesting information about what the GRE means to the most important people: the ones reading your application.

To start off, it’s important to understand exactly how admissions committees work. Admissions committees, especially for small programs, are not as organized or as consistent from year to year as you might think. This is because there is often a high degree of turnover in the grad school admissions committee staff from year to year. While with business schools there may be a fully-staffed admissions committee with only a handful of academics sitting in, in other programs the admissions committee consists entirely of professors and graduate students, many of whom are serving for their first time. What this means is that there is no secret formula for a winning application, since the committees change drastically from year to year.

However, there are certain aspects of your application that are sure to get you noticed by the grad school admissions committee. Read more

I got an email from my cousin the other day—he told me that he’s interested in taking the GRE. Since I’m a GRE instructor with a perfect score on the test, he’d come to the right place. He wanted to know the basics: what first steps should he take? How much should he prep? How does the GRE even work? I gave him some pretty comprehensive advice, and my cousin found it so useful that I wanted to share it with you all. Read on below.

What is the GRE?

So, the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) is administered by ETS (Educational Testing Service), the same organization that administers the TOEFL and some other exams. The GRE is used by a lot of master’s programs, mostly in the sciences and humanities but also more recently for business school as well. It’s worth reading the overview here and here. While it costs $205 each time, I recommend planning to take the exam at least twice. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

There’s nothing wrong with missing a GRE Quant problem because it’s too hard. That’s just the way that the test is designed — there are Quant questions on the GRE that will challenge even the mathematical geniuses among us. However, it’s much more frustrating to miss a problem that you could’ve gotten right, just because you made a silly mistake. Try out the following tips to cut down on careless math errors on the GRE. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Math is unavoidable on the Quantitative sections of the GRE. But it isn’t all about math. By leveraging your strengths — and learning just a couple of ultra-simple math rules — you can gain the advantage over certain Quant problem types, even if you’re more of a Verbal person. Here’s how to apply that idea to Data Interpretation. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

While you’re taking the GRE, you’ll encounter words that you just haven’t learned. It happens to everyone: I’ve gotten a perfect score on the GRE (twice!), and both times, I saw multiple Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence answer choices that I couldn’t define. What does a smart test-taker do when this happens? Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

Let’s do an experiment. This is one I do with all of my GRE classes and tutoring students. Grab a piece of paper, a pen, and a stopwatch (or use the stopwatch function on your mobile device).

When you’re ready, click “start” on the stopwatch and begin the following multiple choice Discrete Quant problem… Read more

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.

Sorry to hear your score isn’t improving yet. That’s the ugly nature of standardized testing; it’s designed to give you the same score over and over again. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort learning a bunch of new things, but on practice tests, the results aren’t showing up yet. Or even worse, after six weeks of hard work, your score took a major nosedive. That’s okay. You’re not alone. Many, if not most, of our students experience a drop in scores on their second test, and may not see an improvement until test 4 or 5. It happens to lots of people. Don’t be discouraged. You can make your score better. Read on. Read more

Did you know that you can attend the first session of any of our online or in-person GRE courses absolutely free? We’re not kidding! Check out our upcoming courses here.

I like to think of GRE problems as belonging to three categories: good, bad, and ugly. These categories are a little different for each test taker, but everyone can use them to make better decisions on the GRE. Read more

A few months back, the New York Times published this fascinating article on the subject of decision fatigue. The article became a big topic of conversation here in the Manhattan GRE office. If you don’t have time to read the full article, I will give a quick summary: the more decisions a human makes in a row, the less will-power that person will have after each successive decision—this phenomenon is called decision fatigue (note: this is a vast oversimplification of the article, so you should give it a read if you have time). The test subjects weren’t asked to make big decisions—no marriage proposals, no career changes, no forced choice between Kirk and Picard—just simple everyday choices, such as what color of china they would prefer, or what specifications they would like in a new computer. The study found that making decisions, even small inconsequential ones, can significantly deplete a person’s willpower.

Read more