GRE Practice Tips?

[Lab Rat83]

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Does anyone know any tips to get through the questions quicker? I finally made myself do one of the practice tests online after I have been studying quite a bit. I felt like I was doing fine until I ran out of time for both the verbal and quantitative sections. I'm really glad I did the practice test because now I know what I have to work on.....getting much quicker at finding the right answer.

I'm doing a serious overhaul on my math skills and brushing up on everything so that I don't have to think things through so much, which will save time. With more practice I know I will become quicker so that part doesn't scare me as much. My writing is good so I shouldn't have much of a problem with that part. However, I am scared that the verbal section is going to really kick my a** when it comes to time.

I'm using the Princeton Review GRE Prep 2010 ed. and I really like it. I'm just seeing if anyone has some useful tips on how to get quicker at answering the questions. Or any study tips for that matter!

I just did a medium practice set of math questions and 20 questions took me 46 mins. (GRE gives 45 mins to do 28 questions).

 

[Willowhand]

The GRE is very fond of putting in questions that you don't actually have to work out to find the answer. That is, if you figure out the "tricks" they commonly use, you can often figure out the answer just by eliminating the answer options that don't fit. Thus, you can often avoid some cumbersome calculations and save a lot of time. Many prep books and some websites have study advice that will help you recognize problems like this. I highly recommend finding one and learning the tricks to save time.

 

[ckgilabert]

i liked the tips that kaplan gave. and then just take the test over and over again. i went to the free kaplan stuff that they have and i also paid for a course (which i totally didnt take advantage of). anyway, i think taking the test over and over, is the best advice given to me.

 

[BlacKAT33]

the tricks that the books teach do help a lot. but you need to look over them a lot so you don't forget them and start doing the natural way you learned how to solve the problem lol

i think you have a good plan. the basic math skills really help to increase your speed. i spent a lot of time practicing basic math and it helped me a lot. Also, i did a lot of practiced Qs timed and then I would go back, redo the Qs after spending as much time as i needed and see how i did when i was time or not. That way you can try to learn to go faster, but you also learn how to solve the problem when it is worked out slowly. Of course, i didnt look at the answers until i was finished with the problems while not being timed. If you need a base time to use, it was usually 30 seconds on the column Qs, and up to 1.5 min on the word problems. So i would just estimate.

i can't help much with the verbal because on the real test i freaked out, lost track of time, and guessed on half the questions to finish on time. i scored really low 🙁 but the good news is, i still got into a school!! lol they asked me to explain my low verbal and then asked what I got on my GRE practice and SAT for a more accurate numbers

 

[Armymutt25A]

I started off in Dec doing some light refreshment, with a focus on geometry - I never had it in high school due to the timing of my transfer from an American school to an English one. As June came around, I started doing practice tests here and there. This gave me a feeling for the types of questions that are asked and, more importantly, exposed me to the tricks mentioned above. The general rule with the GRE is that if you are doing a lot of calculating, something is wrong. It is often better to leave fractions looking very ugly because numbers will cancel out later. Being able to quickly recognize patterns is important. Know your triangles - the 3-4-5, 13-12-5, and x-x-xroot2 show up on almost every triangle. One of the best things I learned is that the Quant section isn't a math test so much as a reading test. Radii quickly become diameters. Measurements given in feet turn into sq yards. I've taken about 20 tests and quizzes since early July and only 5 or so of my errors were due to me not knowing the process. Everything else has been a reading error. Sometimes you get lucky and the GRE writer didn't anticipate your wrong answer, thus giving you another chance to fix yourself. Usually, they are quite nice in providing you the well calculated, but completely wrong answer.

 

[Lab Rat83]

Thanks everyone!

Being able to quickly recognize patterns is important. Know your triangles - the 3-4-5, 13-12-5, and x-x-xroot2 show up on almost every triangle. One of the best things I learned is that the Quant section isn't a math test so much as a reading test. Radii quickly become diameters

Yes, knowing those "special triangles" is very helpful and saves a lot of time. I went through the questions today that I got wrong yesterday and most of the ones I got wrong were indeed reading errors!!

The verbal sections is so boring and IMO quite discouraging. I've studied soooo many word lists (and done well on the reviews) and when it comes time to do the practice tests.....there's a whole new pile of words I've never seen before! At least with the math section I can expect to be prepared for most of what I will see, the verbal section on the other hand..........😱

I do another practice test on Friday and hopefully I see some serious improvement in my score!