GRAD School / MBA News and GMAT / GRE Strategy

At MyGuru, we are generally adamant that the best way to prepare for the GRE is to use official practice materials. But, until recently, the Educational Testing Service made this a bit more difficult than it needed to be.

Time management is important in all walks of life: at home, at school, and at work.  In this article, we'll talk about time management when you are creating and executing a GRE study plan. Before reading this article, if you’d like to take an interesting, short quiz from Mind Tools on how good your time management skills actually are, click here.

The purpose of the GRE’s Analytical Writing section is to test your critical thinking & analytical writing skills. These skills include your ability to properly articulate and support a complex idea, and build strong arguments while composing a well-structured and coherently written essay. One thing to note is that this does not assess your specific knowledge on a given topic.

While you may be taking the GRE to get into graduate school, it may relieve you to know you won’t have to use math that you’ve learned past your sophomore or junior year of high school. Long-winded and drawn out problem solving and arithmetic is not the style of the GRE. So what’s the catch? If the math is so easy, why are you even reading this article on how to tackle the math section? The challenge behind this section draws from the way these limited mathematical concepts are presented to you. In a sense, you need to often systematically deconstruct the problem in the way it’s presented, to determine what is really being asked of you. Once you are able to determine what the question is asking, the actual “number-crunching” or math involved is much less than you might think.

In part one of our “Common Test Taking Strategies” series, we noted that strategy is an intrinsic part of preparing for standardized tests, and that without the proper strategies even the most advanced students find themselves performing below their full potential.  We discussed several proven test taking strategies, including using official test prep materials produced by the same company administering the exam (i.e., the Real ACT Prep Guide if you’re taking the ACT), focusing on what the question is actually asking, scanning all potential answers before choosing one, assuming nothing when deciding which answer is best, and making abstractions concrete.

In part two, we’ll cover five additional test taking strategies:

• Reading and retention “pauses” for long reading comprehension passages
• Answering easy questions first
• Time management
• Providing overly structured responses
• Test “mentality”