Whenever you’re working toward improving a skill and pursuing a long-term goal, your path is likely to go through some periods of significant progress and other periods of stalled progress, or plateaus. This is often a natural part of the process of improvement, but sometimes those plateaus can be stubborn, and they may indicate you need to take a new approach. Plateaus can be especially problematic when the goal you’re pursuing is one with significant impacts on your life, as is the case when studying for the GRE.
The GRE has lots of downstream effects that influence your future path. Your performance on the GRE will determine what kind of grad school you get into, which will then determine the course the rest of your career takes. Therefore, as you go about your GRE prep, it’s crucial to be smart and responsive when you hit a plateau in your progress.
Luckily, people tend to hit plateaus in their GRE prep for a few relatively common reasons, and they can each be addressed in different ways. In this article, we’ll look at some possible causes for your stalled progress in your GRE prep, and we’ll offer solutions for changing your approach so you can start seeing improvements again.