27 Exam strategies from 'Cracking the GRE Premium Edition with 6 Practice Tests, 2020' which can also become life tips
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After all, the GRE leaves you no room to make explanations or justifications for your responses.
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.
This strategy is called Take the Easy Test First. Skip early and skip often.
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.
Over four hours, your brain is going to get tired.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
In fact, sometimes it is easier to identify the wrong answers and eliminate them than it is to find the right ones,
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.
Get into the habit of double-checking all of your answers before you click on your answer choice
The only way to reliably avoid careless errors is to adopt habits that make them less likely to occur.
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.
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.