As many older siblings can tell you, sometimes your younger siblings would rather go hiking in Antarctica before they ask for the tiniest bit of help or advice. So you can imagine my surprise when I got this message from my youngest sister a few months ago: 

Sis : i’m finally kinda trying to maybe somewhat get more serious about gre prep

Sis : i’ve avoided it for a while

Sis : any helpful tips you’ve gained from tutoring? aside from like practicing and getting more familiar? any strategies you've figured out or resources that were surprisingly useful, xyz?

Me (replying within 5 seconds): OMG YES I’VE GOT THIS

I get it, endlessly drilling vocabulary, parsing paragraphs, and reading about complex astrophysics is not the most fun way to spend sunny Saturday afternoons. After all, Saturdays are for the Boys or perusing Thought Catalog on what kind of Saturday is the best Saturday. With a little strategy, you can study in a way that is efficient for your time to focus on the things you need to know for the test.

Here are the top 6 pro-tips I wish someone told me about understanding GRE Verbal, from a 99^th percentile scorer:

There are many opportunities to make mistakes on the GRE, and our Master tutor Greg has witnessed all of them.  With over 500 hours of experience teaching with Cambridge Coaching, he is one of the most well-qualified GRE tutors out there.  What are the most common problems he addresses?  Some of the answers may surprise you.  Greg shares his candid feedback below!

We might expect that the only students who avoided math for years will struggle with the quant section, which deals mostly with topics from a middle school/high school Algebra I class. In fact, students of all stripes encounter a range of challenges. Most students experience a unique combination of strengths and “growing edges,” but here are some patterns I’ve seen over the years.

Map to Remember

GRE passages can be dense and academic like the kind of materials you may encounter in graduate school. These passages place you in the middle of a scholarly conversation, and your role is get your bearings quickly, without getting distracted by details you don’t need to fully grasp. In most passages, the beginning typically provides the background for an idea, explanation, or debate, the middle of the passage provides support or development, and the most important idea comes at the end. (A minority of the passages give away the main idea right at the beginning.)

This week, one of our Master level tutors shares the most commonly forgotten test taking strategy: know the testing policy. Greg's anecdote sheds light on the responsibility of the student and the tutor to learn the policies of the test, and understand what motivates test policy changes.

The right tools will allow you to cut through just about any problem on the GRE quantitative section.

Many topics but a few key strategies

Probably the biggest challenge that students face when approaching the quantitative section on the GRE is the sheer range of topics, which cover numerous concepts up through early high school math. The upside is that not a single one of these topics is particularly complicated, and the way they are tested has more to do with reading carefully, using clues and cues embedded in the question and answer choices strategically, and pacing yourself according to your target score - slower for medium score and faster for high scores.

When Logic Trumps Vocab

While a college vocabulary is certainly larger than a high school vocabulary, particularly for students of the humanities and social studies, there are still a precious few of us who regularly use or even see words like “tyro” or “contumacious.” The majority of text completion (TC) and sentence equivalence (SE) questions do not require you to know every word in the answer choices.

Cultivating Your Vocabulary

Students often feel like vocabulary is one of the biggest hurdles to preparing for the GRE. While vocabulary on the old GRE, pre-2011 played a very outsized role in comprising the verbal score, it’s still important today, although it’s more tied to context, use, and logical thinking. if you have more than a few weeks to study, you’ll be well served to grow your vocabulary. Augmenting your vocabulary with those occasional words, the ones that you only see often enough to feel annoyed with yourself for forgetting, is a skill that you may need in a range of disciplines and professions.

The argument analysis task presents you with a hypothetical situation and draws conclusions based on very weak evidence. Your job is to identify flaws in the argument, in this movement from evidence to conclusion.