Test Day Tip: Mental Math Warm-Up
Come GRE test day, there isn’t much left to do in the way of studying. Cramming new material on the day of your exam is stressful and won’t give you much of a positive return on time invested. However, there are some things that you can do on test day to further your GRE success. One thing that I found very useful when I took my GRE was performing a math warm-up.
The day before your test, pick out a few questions (five or so should suffice) from your study materials. These shouldn’t be the toughest problems in the book, just regular problems that you have confidently solved before. They should require some critical thinking and calculation, but shouldn’t be problems that give you fits “ you don’t want extremely taxing problems that will trip you up and make you second guess yourself. Flag the questions, and their answers, in your book for the next morning.
On the morning of your test before leaving for the testing center, solve the problems; this will act as a simple jump-start for your brain. Your mind will click into the mode where it looks for GRE clues in word problems. With a few calculations under your belt, will become more able to add, subtract, and multiply simple numbers without writing the operations out on your paper. After a few questions, you will have kicked the rust off of your synapses and boosted your confidence.
This might sound silly, but believe me, it will help. If any of you do the KenKen puzzles in your morning newspapers, you should know why. Unless you are an actuary by profession, you probably don’t wake up in the morning ready to start doing mathematics. When I start solving a KenKen, simple arithmetic takes time to solve, but after a while I start multiplying and dividing in my head without any problem. It takes a little time to get into a grove with math, and you want to walk into the testing center in the middle of that groove.
Timing on the GRE can come down to the wire; 30 extra seconds can mean one or two extra right answers. Simple warm-up problems are like the weighted bats that baseball players swing in the on deck circle “ the sluggers lose the weights, step up to the plate, and their bat speed improves by a fraction of a second. Doing a few warm-up problems before heading out to the testing center can help shave a few seconds off of your first 5 or so GRE math problems, which can be a big help.
Try this out on test day (or even before your next simulated practice test). I think you’ll be pleased with the results.