Quality Test Prep

On your test prep journey, success will come not from the quantity of practice you, but from the quality of that practice.

What does quality mean when it comes to the GRE?

First, make sure you’re using high quality materials to practice from. Generally speaking, this means do the bulk of your studying using Official GRE questions and tests. The GRE sells 3 books with practice problems and tests. They also offer two full-length free tests and 3 full-length paid tests. You can find those on their website.

If you want more practice specifically for the math side of the test, Manhattan Prep’s 5lb Book is a great resource for millions of problems to drill any quant subject. For Verbal, however, it is very difficult to find resources whose practice questions actually match the difficulty level of the real test. For that reason, I prefer to stick only with official GRE questions and to supplement by practicing active reading on anything and everything you read.

Okay, so we have the materials covered. What’s next?

Since the GRE is, ultimately, a test on how well you know the GRE, the best way to get better is to do extensive reviews of every practice problem you get wrong.

Every practice session, set aside time to review your mistakes and take notes.

Sometimes it will be careless mistakes, easy to fix. Sometimes you’ll have to read explanations and do the problem a few times to figure out where you went wrong.

Keeping track of all of this in a log of some sort allows you to go back and review later. As you look through your mistake log, you’ll also begin to learn your tendencies and common mistakes. And then avoid those in future!