GRAD School / MBA News and GMAT / GRE Strategy

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.

While much of the subject matter on the Quant section of the GRE will be familiar to you, one common question type is likely to be unfamiliar: Quantitative Comparisons. QC questions are extremely important to focus on in your GRE prep, as they account for over a third of the entire Quantitative section of the test. However, it’s likely that you haven’t encountered this particular question structure before.

If you’re studying for the GRE, then you’re probably already aware that vocabulary is a big component of the test. The GRE—or Graduate Record Examination—contains many questions that test your knowledge of academic English. Unfortunately, there’s no way to gain a comprehensive knowledge of every possible word you might encounter on test day. The English language is simply too vast. Even studying official past tests will only help you insofar as it teaches you the kind of words you’re likely to encounter on the test. The actual vocab words you’ll encounter on test day are unlikely to include many repeats from past tests.

But all that doesn’t mean there’s no way to prep for the vocabulary on the GRE. It just means you’re going to have to more strategic in the ways you study. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of helpful study tips, so you can make the most of your GRE prep.

If you’re considering applying to grad school, then there’s a good chance you’re going to have to contend with the GRE. The GRE—more fully known as the Graduate Record Exam—is used as an admissions test by many graduate schools in the US and Canada, for a variety of academic disciplines. The GRE’s wide applicability has to do with the fact that it measures a broad and general range of skills, including verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, analytical writing, and critical thinking.

This is the first in a multipart series on how to go about studying for the GRE or GMAT. We don’t plan on going into detail on specific concepts covered on the GRE or specific test-taking strategies in this series. Instead, the intention is to cover higher level, foundational issues around preparing for these exams, such as what type of support to get, what materials to use, what mindset to cultivate, etc. This article is being posted on our GRE blog, but we’ll switch from GRE to GMAT over time, as the concepts are broadly applicable to both exams.

There are two games you must win if you want to score well on the GRE. The first is what I call the “outer” game. It consists of the how-to’s for getting right answers — the x’s and o’s, if you will — including math concepts, vocabulary, formulas, strategic elimination strategies, time management, and other such tangible applications. The outer game is where GRE students spend most of their time, and it’s what our online GRE prep courses do such a great job of teaching.