Chapter 2

Owning the GRE: Strategies for Success

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Managing your time before and during the test

Bullet Deciding whether to retake the GRE

Bullet Taking action if the test isn’t administered properly

Bullet Using scores up to five years old

The GRE isn’t an IQ test. Nor is it a measure of your worth as a human being or a predictor of your ultimate success in life. The GRE is designed to assess your ability to excel in grad school by sizing you up in three areas:

  • Work ethic: How hard you’re willing and able to work to achieve an elusive academic goal — in this case, performing well on the GRE — reflects (to them) your work ethic. Graduate schools consider this to be a measure of how hard you’ll work in their programs.
  • Study skills: To do well on the GRE, you must master some basic study skills and be able to process and retain new information.
  • Test-taking ability: This is your ability to perform well on a test, under pressure, which is a separate ability from being able to answer the questions. Exams are an essential part of grad school, so you need to prove that you can take a test without folding under pressure.

This book can’t help you in the first area: That’s all you. As a study guide, however, this book shapes you up in the second and third areas, enabling you to study more effectively and efficiently and improve your overall test-taking skills. By knowing the material and taking the practice tests, you establish a foundation for doing well on the GRE.

This chapter is designed to take your study skills and test-taking ability to the next level. To beat the GRE at its game, you need to maximize the use of your time, focus on key areas, and apply strategies to answer the questions quickly and correctly. This chapter shows you how to do all these things and provides you with a Plan B — what to do if things don’t go so well the first time.

Making the Best Use of Your Time

As soon as you decide to take the GRE, the clock starts ticking. You have only so much time to study and practice, and suddenly so little time before the exam is tomorrow morning. The good news: I’ve taken many a student down this road, with great results, and here I’ve distilled the best of the success strategies. The following sections show you how to optimize your study and practice time so you can answer the test questions more efficiently.

Budgeting your time for studying

As an undergrad, you may have mastered the fine art of cramming the night before an exam, but that doesn’t work on the GRE. This test is based less on memorization and more on skills, which take time to develop. Give yourself plenty of time to absorb all the material you need to study. Here’s what I recommend in terms of total time, the amount of that time you spend working through this book, and the amount of time to set aside per day:

  • Six to twelve weeks of total preparation: Give yourself plenty of time to work through this book, take practice exams, and review areas where you need extra preparation. Six to eight weeks works well for most people, but more time is generally better. At 12 weeks, you can do extremely well, but after 12 weeks, most people get burned out or lose interest, and they forget things they learned early on.
  • Three to four weeks on this book: Working through this book takes about three weeks, not including the practice tests. The practice tests should each take math hours (no essays) or math hours (with essays), plus another hour or two to review the answer explanations.
  • One to three hours per day, five or six days per week: Pace yourself. I’ve seen too many students burn themselves out from trying to master the whole test in three days. Your brain needs time to process all this new information and be ready to absorb more.

Tip If you have only a few weeks to study, mark your weakest subject areas in the table of contents at the beginning of this book and work through those chapters or sections first. If you’re not sure about your weakest subject areas, take one of the practice tests in the book or use the online practice questions online to find out.

This book provides broad coverage of everything you’re likely to encounter on the test, but if taking the practice tests reveals weaknesses in certain areas, you may need to consult additional resources to improve your understanding and skills.

Remember Prioritize your study time and schedule daily review sessions. Otherwise, other activities and responsibilities are likely to clutter your day and push study time off your to-do list.

Budgeting your time for practice

Just because you know a subject inside and out doesn’t mean you can ace it on the GRE. Test-taking requires a completely separate skill set. Start taking practice tests at least two weeks prior to your scheduled GRE so you have time to hone your skills, learn from your mistakes, and strengthen your weak areas. I once had a group of financial advisors struggle with the math portion. When I asked them about this, the answer was that they use Excel for everything!

Warning Your proficiency with the test itself is as important as your math and verbal skills. As you take the practice tests, check your testing performance. Many major mistakes begin two hours into the exam. Do you still try as hard as you did in the beginning? Do you begin to misread questions, make simple math mistakes, or fall for traps?

In addition to working the practice tests in this book, I recommend working the free computer-based practice tests that Educational Testing Service (ETS) provides at www.ets.org. See Chapter 3 for details.

Taking control: Time management tips

Taking the GRE is a little like playing Beat the Clock. The computer provides you with a stopwatch — an on-screen clock — to time each section. Your goal is to answer as many questions correctly as quickly as possible before the clock reaches 0:00. You have the option of hiding the on-screen clock, but I don’t recommend this. Instead, make the on-screen timer familiar and comfortable (or rather, less uncomfortable) by using a stopwatch while doing homework and practice tests. Practicing with a stopwatch is part of preparing for the test-taking experience.

Don’t obsess over giving each question a specific number of seconds, but do know when to give up and come back to a question later. As long as you haven’t exited a section, you can return to questions in that section. Simply call up the Review Screen by clicking Review, click the question you want to return to, and then click Go to Question. You can mark a question for review so it’s flagged on the Review Screen, or you can write the question number down on your scrap paper. Just keep in mind that while you’re on the Review Screen, the clock still ticks. (See Chapter 3 for more about the computer version of the test.)

Plan B: Repeating the Test

Upon completing the exam, you have the option of accepting and seeing your scores immediately or canceling the results if you think you did poorly. If you cancel the results, you can always retake the test. Most schools consider only your highest exam score, or you can choose to send only that highest score (see the ScoreSelect discussion in Chapter 1), so I’d only cancel if you really think something went south on test day that isn’t normal for you.

If you cancel a score and later have second thoughts about that cancellation, you can reinstate the canceled score up to 60 days after the test date. As of this writing, the service costs $50, and reinstatement takes up to two weeks.

If you proceed with your exam score and it isn’t so hot, don’t fret: Most test-takers who repeat the exam tend to do much better the second time. It’s as if there’s no better way to prepare for the GRE than taking the GRE. Of course, you want to avoid having to do this, but if the first round doesn’t go so well, it’s okay.

Tip Be sure to schedule your GRE a month before your school needs the scores. That way, if you do have to retake the exam, you’ll still meet the application deadline. Also, just knowing you have a second chance helps ease your nerves in the first round.

If you think you underperformed on the GRE, consider the following when deciding whether to retake it and when preparing to retake the exam:

  • What went wrong here? If you made mistakes because of a lack of familiarity with either the test format (you didn’t understand what to do when faced with a Quantitative Comparison question) or substance (you didn’t know the vocabulary words or were baffled by the geometry problems), these are easy gaps to close, and you’re a good candidate for doing better the second time.

    The practice tests are designed to help you address these issues ahead of time: If you know what you did wrong, you can mend your ways and improve your score.

    After taking the actual GRE, you don’t get to review the correct and incorrect answer choices. However, you can get a good sense of the types of mistakes that you’re likely to make by going through the practice tests in this book and reviewing your wrong answers afterward.

  • Was there something beyond my control? Maybe your nerves were acting up on the first exam, you were feeling ill, or you didn’t get enough sleep the night before. In that case, by all means repeat the exam. You’re bound to feel better the next time. If the test was administered poorly or in a room full of distractions, you really should consider a retake. (See the later section “It Isn’t You: Testing Under Adverse Conditions” for details.)
  • Did I choke? This happens all the time, especially on the essays at the beginning. Or you could have panicked on a thorny math question, spending several minutes and frazzling yourself for the rest of the test. Fortunately, choking doesn’t usually happen again. Almost every test-taker I’ve seen choke does phenomenally better on the next try.
  • Did I run out of steam? Stamina is a key factor of success on the four-hour GRE. If you don’t practice writing the essays when taking the practice tests, you won’t be prepared for the extra hour of work before the Math and Verbal sections. Also, because you’re amped on test day, you’re likely to crash faster than usual. Knowing what to expect and preparing for it could boost your score on a retest.
  • Am I eligible to retake the GRE? You can take the GRE only once per 21-day period and no more than five times per rolling 12 months. If you try to take the test more often than that, you won’t be stopped from registering for or taking the test, but your scores won’t be reported.

Can repeating the exam hurt you? Typically, no. Most schools consider only your highest score. Find out from the individual schools you’re interested in whether that’s their policy; it isn’t the same for every school. If you’re on the borderline, or if several students are vying for one spot, sometimes having taken the exam repeatedly can hurt you (especially if your most recent score took a nosedive). On the other hand, an admissions counselor who sees several exams with ascending scores may be impressed that you stuck to it and kept trying, even if your score rose only slightly. In general, if you’re willing to invest the study time and effort and take the repeat exam seriously, go for it.

All your test scores for the past five years are part of your record, but you can choose which scores to send using the ScoreSelect option, as I explain in Chapter 1. For example, if you did great in October but not so well in April, you can tell ETS to send just the October scores to the schools.

It Isn’t You: Testing Under Adverse Conditions

Your test isn’t actually administered by ETS. It’s administered by a company licensed by ETS, and the company is required to adhere to certain standards. If something odd happens during the test that you believe negatively affected your score, such as construction noises, no working air-conditioning (I’m in Phoenix), or anything else that shouldn’t be the case, register a complaint with ETS at GRE-Info@ets.org for a chance to have those scores cancelled and for you to retake the exam, at no charge. You have seven days to register a complaint, so don’t delay.

Warning Complaining to the testing center staff does no good — it actually says that on ETS’s website! You must communicate directly with ETS.

One of my students was seated and ready to begin the GRE, only to have the test start time delayed an hour! On top of that, a lot of noise was coming from the next room — definitely an unwarranted distraction. If something like this happens to you, you can petition to have your score withheld and for the opportunity to take the GRE again at no charge.

Remember The testing centers tend to freeze the heck out of the exam rooms, so being chilly isn’t grounds for registering a complaint! It does mean that you should prepare by wearing layers that you can remove if needed. Note that the testing center may not allow you to wear a jacket, but a sweater is okay.

Using Old Scores

What if you took the GRE a long time ago when you thought you were going to grad school and then opted to take a job or start a family instead? Well, if it was within the past five years, you’re in luck (assuming you scored well). GRE scores are reportable for up to five years. That means that if you’re pleased with your old score, you can send it right along to the school of your choice and say adios to this book right here and now. However, if you took the test more than five years ago, you have to take it again.