This chapter contains some basic advice to get you into The Princeton Review mindset. You’ll learn some core test-taking strategies to help you maximize your score. In addition, you’ll see some of the different question formats you will probably encounter on test day.
Although ETS claims that the GRE measures “critical thinking, analytical writing, verbal reasoning, and quantitative reasoning skills that have been acquired over a long period of time,” that isn’t quite true. Again, what the GRE really measures is how well you take the GRE. The first step to bettering your GRE score is realizing that you can improve your score, in many cases substantially, by familiarizing yourself with the test and by practicing the techniques in this book.
ETS would have you believe that its tests are coach-proof, but that is simply untrue. In many ways, taking a standardized test is a skill and, as with any skill, you can become more proficient at it by both practicing and following the advice of a good teacher. Think of your GRE preparation as if you were practicing for a piano recital or a track meet; you wouldn’t show up at the concert hall or track field without having put in hours of practice beforehand (at least we hope you wouldn’t!). If you want to get a good score on the GRE, you’ll have to put in the necessary preparation time.
Quite simply, because we monitor the GRE. Our teaching methods were developed through exhaustive analysis of all of the available GREs and careful research into the methods by which standardized tests are constructed. Our focus is on the basic concepts that will enable you to attack any problem, strip it down to its essential components, and solve it in as little time as possible.
You might be surprised to learn that the GRE isn’t written by distinguished professors, renowned scholars, or graduate school admissions officers. For the most part, it’s written by ordinary ETS employees, sometimes with freelance help from local graduate students. You have no reason to be intimidated.
As you become more familiar with the test, you will also develop a sense of “the ETS mentality.” This is a predictable kind of thinking that influences nearly every part of nearly every ETS exam. By learning to recognize the ETS mentality, you’ll earn points even when you aren’t sure why an answer is correct. You’ll inevitably do better on the test by learning to think like the people who wrote it.
“Cracking the system” is our phrase for getting inside the minds of the people who write these tests. This emphasis on earning points rather than pinpointing the correct answer may strike you as somewhat cynical, but it is crucial to doing well on the GRE. After all, the GRE leaves you no room to make explanations or justifications for your responses.
You’ll do better on the GRE by putting aside your feelings about real education and surrendering yourself to the strange logic of the standardized test.
As discussed briefly in Chapter 1, the GRE is a computer-adaptive test, or CAT for short. During the test, you will see two scored Math and Verbal sections, and the difficulty of the second scored section of either subject is determined by your performance on the first scored section. Depending on your performance in the first scored section of a subject, you will receive an easy, medium, or hard second section. Obviously enough, to achieve a high score on the GRE you need to get as many questions correct as you can, which means that the highest scores will result from performing well on the first scored section and the hardest of the second sections. However, the difficulty of an individual question plays no role in determining your score; that is, your score is calculated by your performance on the entirety of the scored sections, not just a handful of the hardest questions on a given section.
Within a section, each question counts equally toward your score. There will inevitably be questions you are great at and questions you don’t like. The beauty of the GRE is that there is no need to bow to Phoenician numerical hegemony; you can answer questions in any order you like. The question you can nail in 25 seconds is worth just as much as the question that will torture you for minutes on end. To maximize your score, leave the questions you don’t like for last. If you are going to run out of time anywhere—and unless you are shooting for a 160 or higher, you should be running out of time—make sure that the questions that get chopped off are the ones you didn’t want to answer anyway.
This strategy is called Take the Easy Test First. Skip early and skip often. Doing so will result in two passes through an individual section. On the first pass, cherry pick. Answer the questions you like. Get all of those easy points in the bank before time starts running short. You know that the hard questions—or the ones that you don’t like—are going to take more time. Also, although you should never rush, everyone starts to feel the pressure of the clock as time starts running low. This is often when mistakes happen. Leave those difficult, time-consuming questions for the end of the test. If you run out of time or make some mistakes at that point, it won’t matter because these are questions that you are less likely to get right anyway, so don’t sweat these too much. Focus your time where you feel confident you are likely to score points.
On your first pass through the questions, if you see a question you don’t like, a question that looks hard, or a question that looks time consuming, you’re going to walk on by and leave it for the end. Sometimes, however, a question that looks easy turns out to be more troublesome than you thought. The question may be trickier than it first appeared, or you may have simply misread it, and it seems hard only because you’re working with the wrong information. From start to finish, the GRE is nearly a four-hour test. Over four hours your brain is going to get tired. When that happens, misreading a question is virtually inevitable. Once you read a question wrong, however, it is almost impossible to un-read that and see it right. As long as you are still immersed in the question, you could read it 10 times in a row and you will read it the same wrong way each time.
Whether a question is harder than it first appeared, or made harder by the fact that you missed a key phrase or piece of information, the approach you’ve taken is not working. This is where the Mark button comes in.
Reset your brain by walking away from the problem, but Mark the question before you do. Do two or three other questions, and then return to the marked problem. When you walk away, your brain doesn’t just forget the problem, it keeps on processing in the background. The distraction of the other questions helps your brain to consider the question from other angles. When you return to the problem, you may find that the part that gave you so much trouble the first time is now magically clear. If the problem continues to give you trouble, walk away again.
Staying with a problem when you’re stuck burns time but yields no points. You might spend two, three, five, or even six minutes on a problem but still be no closer to the answer. Spending five minutes to get one point will not get you enough points on a 30- or 35-minute section. In the five minutes you spend on a problem that you’ve misread, you could nail three or four easier questions. When you return to the question that gave you trouble, there is a good chance that you will spot your error, and the path to the correct answer will become clear. If it doesn’t become clear, walk away again. Any time you encounter resistance on the test, do not keep pushing; bend like a reed and walk away. Use the Mark button to facilitate this key skill. Skip early and often so that you always have questions to distract your brain when you get stuck.
Within a single section, you can mark an answered or unanswered question and return to it later. In fact you can skip any question you like and return to any question at any time you like. Navigating around a section is easy with the new Review Screen, which looks like this:
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Question Number |
Status |
Marked |
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1 |
Not Answered |
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2 |
Not Answered |
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3 |
Not Answered |
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4 |
Not Answered |
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5 |
Not Answered |
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6 |
Not Answered |
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7 |
Answered |
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8 |
Answered |
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9 |
Answered |
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10 |
Answered |
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11 |
Answered |
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12 |
Not Answered |
Simply click on a question and hit the button marked “Go To Question,” and you will return directly to that question. This opens up a whole new realm of strategic opportunities for the savvy test taker.
You should take the easy test first and you should spend most of your time on questions that you know how to answer, or are reasonably certain you can answer.
When you return for your second pass, you will be able to answer some of the questions that you marked during your first pass. A fresh set of eyes on a problem you’ve already seen is sometimes all it takes for a solution to present itself. But there may also be some questions that you do not know how to answer no matter how many times you look at them.
When you confront a question like this, try to eliminate any answer choice you can, but make sure to guess. There is no penalty for incorrect answers on the GRE. As a result, it’s better to guess than it is to leave a question blank. At least by guessing, you stand a chance at getting lucky and guessing correctly.
Because there are many more wrong answers on the GRE than there are credited answers, on some of the more difficult questions (those you do on your second pass) you’ll actually be better served not by trying to find the correct answer, but instead by finding the wrong answers and using POE, Process of Elimination.
Remember when you were in high school, and even if you got a question wrong on a test, your teacher gave you partial credit? For example, maybe you used the right formula on a math question, but miscalculated and got the wrong result, so your teacher gave you some credit because you understood the concept.
Well, those days are over. There is no partial credit on the GRE. On the other hand, ETS doesn’t know or care how you get the right answer. A lucky guess is worth just as many points as a question that you solve completely and correctly.
There is one thing for which we must thank ETS. They have actually given us the answers! For most problems, there are five answer choices, and one of them is correct. It is important to remember that the answer choices are part of the problem. Many of them will be clearly wrong and can, therefore, be eliminated. In fact, sometimes it is easier to identify the wrong answers and eliminate them than it is to find the right ones, as we discussed on the previous page. As you know, this approach is called Process of Elimination, or POE.
POE will be crucial on the verbal side of the test. Vocabulary-based questions will include plenty of words you don’t know. For such questions, you may not be able to identify the correct answer, but you will certainly be able to identify some wrong ones. Get rid of the wrong ones so that when you guess, you have a fifty-fifty shot and not a 20 percent chance. The same holds true for the reading comp questions, which will include plenty of answer choices that are clearly wrong.
On the math side of the test, ETS loves to sucker you into doing more math than is really necessary. You can often eliminate answer choices that are clearly too large or too small. Sometimes it is even more efficient to eliminate wrong answers than it is to do the math required to come up with the right one. We will discuss POE and its close cousin, Ballparking, in Part III.
On questions you find difficult, you should be able to improve your score on the GRE by using POE. Why? Because, once you’ve eliminated the wrong answers, picking the right one(s) can be a piece of cake.
Wrong answers on standardized multiple-choice tests are known in the testing industry as “distractors,” or “trap answers.” They are called distractors because their purpose is to distract test takers away from correct choices. Trap answers are specifically designed to appeal to test takers. Oftentimes, they’re the answers that seem to scream out “pick me!” as you work through a question. However, these attractive answers are often incorrect.
Remembering this simple fact can be an enormous help to you as you sit down to take the test. By learning to recognize distractors, you will greatly improve your score.
Every time you’re able to eliminate an incorrect choice on a GRE question, you improve your odds of finding the correct answer; the more incorrect choices you eliminate, the better your odds.
For this reason, some of our test-taking strategies are aimed at helping you arrive at ETS’s answer indirectly. Doing this will make you much more successful at avoiding the traps laid in your path by the test writers. This is because most of the traps are designed to catch unwary test takers who try to approach the problems directly.
If you guessed blindly on a five-choice GRE problem, you would have a one-in-five chance of picking ETS’s answer. Eliminate one incorrect choice, and your chances improve to one in four. Eliminate three, and you have a fifty-fifty chance of earning points by guessing. Get the picture?
ETS doesn’t give you many useful tools on this test, so you have to make good use of the ones they do give you. You will get six sheets of scratch paper stapled into a booklet. You can get more by raising your hand during a section, but that takes time, so you will need an efficient system for using scratch paper.
Mistakes happen in your head, but good technique happens on scratch paper. When you do work in your head, you are really doing two things at once. The first is figuring out the answer at hand, and the second is keeping track of where you’ve been. Mistakes happen when you try to do two things in your head at once. It’s better to park your thinking on your scratch paper. Get it out of your head and onto the page. Good things happen when you do.
On the math side, scratch paper is crucial. Not only is it important for performing complicated calculations, but when used properly, it can actually help to direct your thinking as you work through multistep problems. In the math sections of this book, we will give you graphic set-ups for each math concept that you will encounter. Use them consistently, and they will become good habits that will pay big dividends in accuracy, even over a four-hour exam.
On the verbal side, scratch paper is every bit as essential. It will help you to track your progress, to focus on only one answer choice at a time, and to work through a series of answer choices efficiently. In the verbal section of this book, we will give you a process for using scratch paper efficiently and effectively.
Get into the habit of double-checking all of your answers before you click on your answer choice—or answer choices. Make sure that you reread the directions and have done everything they asked you to—don’t get the answer wrong just because you chose only one answer for a question that required you to choose two or more.
The only way to reliably avoid careless errors is to adopt habits that make them less likely to occur. Always check to see that you’ve transcribed information correctly to your scratch paper. Always read the problem at least twice and note any important parts that you might forget later. Always check your calculations. And always read the question one last time before selecting your answer.
Every time you begin a new section, focus on that section and put the last section you completed behind you. Don’t think about that pesky synonym from an earlier section while a geometry question is on your screen. You can’t go back, and besides, your impression of how you did on a section is probably much worse than reality.
The week before the test is not the time for any major life changes. This is NOT the week to quit smoking, start smoking, quit drinking coffee, start drinking coffee, start a relationship, end a relationship, or quit a job. Business as usual, okay?
Before you dive in, you might wish to take one of the practice tests in this book or online to get a sense of where you are starting from. It can be a good exercise to tackle a practice test before you know any strategies or have reviewed any content—while you have relatively fresh eyes to the test-taking experience. This will be a good initial impression and these first scores will show you what content areas need your focus. Of course, you’ll review all necessary content for the GRE (won’t you?), but this first test can serve as a helpful guide. Then, as you learn strategies and review math and verbal content, you’ll have a genuine sense of accomplishment.
Now let’s get cracking!
You can increase your score on the GRE through practice and successful application of test-taking strategies.
The GRE uses a variety of question formats throughout the test.
Accuracy is better than speed. Slow down and focus on accumulating as many points as possible. Forcing yourself to work faster results in careless errors and lower scores.
Process of Elimination is an extremely useful tool on the test. Use it to eliminate wrong answers and increase your odds of guessing correctly.
