GRE Redux: What To Do About The Redo
Took the GRE once and it didn’t go exactly as you planned? Join the club. I’ve always been pretty good at standardized tests, and tests in general. So I thought I could just sort of review the GRE material, show up, and do a great job. But that’s not what happened. I didn’t get a great score. I didn’t even get a good score. I got a terrible score.
The GRE really has a special way of making you feel dumb. The questions look easy, at a glance. You’re just deciding which of two values is bigger, and they’re often expressed in very simple terms. Or you’re picking a word to put in a sentence! And sometimes they are words you’ve heard a thousand times, but you still can’t be quite sure what they mean. It’s not like they’re asking you to build a rocket. And yet there we are, smart, educated people, driven to frustration by this seemingly simple test.
But it’s not simple. You already know that “ presumably, you’re reading this because you’re studying for the GRE. And whether this is the first time you’re taking the test or your getting ready for your next shot, here are a few pieces of advice from someone who’s been there.
Don’t get discouraged.
This might not seem like an important step, but it really is. Succeeding at the GRE takes perseverance, and it’s hard to stick with it if you don’t see success as a possibility.
It’s important to remember that your first score doesn’t tell you anything about the potential of your next score. If you put in the time to learn the material and practice how it’s tested on the exam, your score will go up. The only limit to how much it goes up is that eventually they run out of points to give you.
On the other hand, if you don’t do anything but wait a month in hopes that your first score was a fluke and it will go up this time, I’d wager that it will stay just the same.
Make a plan.
If your score isn’t what you wanted, you have to make some honest assessments about why that might be. Take a look at your practice test data with an eye toward discovering patterns in your mistakes. Is there a particular problem type that’s harder for you than others? A certain family of vocabulary? A particular topic in math?
Finding the weaknesses in your practice exams can show you where to focus your attention. If what you’re seeing as problems in the practice tests aren’t what you think of as your own weaknesses, it could be that you’re having trouble applying what you know on the exam. That means you need to focus on real questions that test that material and work through a process for showing what you know.
Work in little bits.
You can’t learn math or vocabulary in one day. You can’t learn them in one weekend. To a great extend, math and vocabulary are skills more than knowledge. Because of that, they have to be practiced, the same way you would practice a sport or a musical instrument. When you learn to play piano, for example, there are some words and symbols and rules you have to memorize, but you learn to play the piano by playing it. By practicing, a little bit, each day.
The same things work for the GRE. Practice your math in drills and in problems. Practice it one topic at a time and practice the topics missed. Practice question types in isolation and practice them together. Take your vocab words one or two at a time, and use them. Write with them, talk with them, and put them in a context where they’ll stick. The more you interact with the material, the more it will stick. It will build on itself and get easier and easier to learn as a few pieces get set in place.
Use practice tests “ but don’t overuse them.
Practice tests are really important. But sometimes students over-utilize them when that time could be better spent on focused, targeted studying.
Practice tests are primarily good for two things: to practice your testing strategy, and to assess where your score currently stands. They are definitely not the most efficient tool for learning material. As the expression goes, weighing a pig won’t make it fatter. In other words, assessing where you stand is important, but it’s not really a great way to improve.
It’s hard to make a hard-and-fast rule, but I would say that taking a practice test more than once a week is too much. You goal in a practice test should be to assess where you stand, practice your testing strategy, review your mistakes, and identify what to do next. Then you don’t want to take a test again unless you have something to assess.
Remove whatever stresses you can.
This one is especially important if your performance on test day was drastically lower than your practice tests. Make sure you make every effort you can to remove additional stresses on test day.
Schedule the test for a time of day when you perform well. Know the test center logistics and paperwork requirements ahead of time. And take your practice exams in as real a setting as you can: a quiet room, with standard length breaks. Take the whole exam in one sitting, at a desk, without any drinks or snacks on the desk, at the same time of day as your exam. You may as well do everything you can to make the real test feel like something you’ve done many times before.
If you had a successful retake after a not-so-successful first run, what are some of the things that worked for you?