Sometimes life can throw you a curve ball, or simply move way faster than you expected. For example, you may wake up one morning, and realize that, for whatever the reason, you only have a week until you need to take the GRE.
Today we'll look at a countdown-style guide to getting prepared for the GRE in just 7 days. Of course, you should customize the guide for your particular situation (everybody’s is different), and I’ve included some suggestions and tips for alternative ways to use the guide.
Let the countdown begin!
1 Week to the GRE: Getting Prepped in 7 Days
T minus 7. With 7 days to go before the test day, you need to take the quickest route to finding exactly what you need to do to get ready. You can’t afford to waste energy on anything you don’t have to. The thing that will best help you determine exactly where to focus your energies is an accurate snapshot of your test readiness. The snapshot will show where your strengths and weaknesses lie. The most accurate snapshot for your GRE preparedness is obtained by taking one of the free practice tests available from the makers of the GRE. Once you have the snapshot, you can start practicing and reviewing exactly where you need to. (See the bottom of this article for some tips on how to take the practice test if you’re extra severely crunched for time.)
Be sure to check on whether the school/s and/or department/s you’re applying to place a lot of emphasis on the Analytical Writing score. If not, you can go light on writing prep and devote extra time to the Quantitative Reasoning and Verbal Reasoning sections.
T minus 6. At 6 days before the test, start your focused review on the weakest areas revealed by your practice test “snapshot” from the day before. You will have already done some review on the day before, when you went over the explanations for the questions you missed on the practice test. If you don’t have any specialized GRE study materials, you may want to browse online or at a bookstore or library to find GRE prep books or other study materials.
Of course, it would be ideal to be able to spend every moment of every day of the week before the test doing nothing but GRE practice, but round-the-clock review completely sheltered from distractions is a luxury many of us don’t have. Something portable, such as a book, flashcards, or amobile app, such as those available from Benchprep, is just the ticket if you need to be able to take advantage of every available break in your busy schedule to cram in more practice. You can also find free review materials for review on topics such as vocabulary words.
T minus 5. On day five before the test, take a break from practice on your weakest areas, and devote time to the areas you’re already fairly strong in, but still have room to improve. Search for examples of medium-to-difficult types of questions you’ll face in those areas. Also, spend some time making a list of the general strategies you use to help in answering the questions you’re good at. Analyze those strategies, break them down, and see if you can make them even better and more efficient. Also look for sections in your test prep materials that discuss strategies and tips for each section of the test. Strategies are time-efficient, because they’re usually general enough to be used in a variety of situations once you learn to apply them.
If this is the very first time you’re taking the GRE, you’ll want to get used to the specific question formats and the way that the test makers ask questions. The GRE approach to Quantitative andVerbal topics is often quite different than the perspective you’d hear in a normal math or English class. If you don’t take enough time to understand the basics of “GRE Speak”, you may end up missing questions that you actually know how to do because of a simple misunderstanding.
Also spend some time on writing practice. Even if your written score will not be a deal breaker on the school you’re applying to, it’s good practice in critical reasoning skills that can transfer to the Verbal Reasoning section. Also, it will put you more at ease during the actual test if the writing seems routine. Practice brainstorming ideas and creating a brief outline for multiple topics. You probably won’t have time to crank out a lot of full-blown essays, so a great way to save time is to spend time reading sample essays in a test prep book or other resource. Such sample essays are usually in sets that provide an example and explanation of each possible writing score level. Analyzing a set of example essays will teach you a lot about what the graders are looking for in your written response to the Analytical Writing prompt.
T minus 4. With 4 days left before the test, return to your weakest and weaker areas. The “day off” when you focused on stronger areas should have boosted your confidence, and also hopefully gave you time to subconsciously process and assimilate the new knowledge from the weak areas you studied on T-minus-6. Now head back into those areas and see how much you remember and how much you’ve forgotten from two days ago. Pick your battles. Much like skipping a hard question on the actual test and coming back to it, you can skip any review topics that make you feel like you’re banging your head against a wall with no result, work on topics where you can see progress faster, and then come back to the harder topics for yet another go.
If your schedule is broken up with work and/or classes you have to attend, try reciting important formulas, facts, and strategies to yourself as you’re walking or driving to or from the class room or workplace. You can also recite to yourself while taking a stroll for exercise and fresh air.
T minus 3. With 3 days before “launch”, it’s time to take another practice test. This will give you an update snapshot that documents the progress you’ve made in the last few days and highlights the areas that still need the most work. Pay close attention to your strong areas; if you’re satisfied with your score in them, that’s excellent, but if you’re surprised that you don’t see as much progress as you thought you would, you may need to spend some time researching in test prep materials to see how to tweak your approach to reach the level of performance you’re expecting from those strong areas. Meanwhile, you should see noticeable improvements in some, if not all, of your weaker areas. Extend your heartfelt congratulations to yourself on those areas of improvement, and double your resolve to whip any problem areas into shape.
T minus 2. If possible, go all out today. Double up on your weak areas. Keep picking your battles; invest the most time where you expect to get the most returns from it.
Before tackling the hardest examples in a particular topic, make sure that you’re doing your very best on the low- and medium-difficulty examples. If you keep finding that you actually knew how to do a problem that you missed, it may be a sign that you need to slow down a bit, and read the questions more carefully. The wording is often designed to be somewhat misleading, so it’s easy to be led astray if you rush through the problems too much. You don’t want to be missing problems that you already know how to do. Make sure that by today you have an accurate feel for your optimal pace. You need to be comfortable by this point with using the “mark and review” feature of the software that allows you to guess/skip on a question but come back to it later. Just be sure not to leave any questions blank before the section ends, because it would significantly lower your score! When in doubt, take your best guess, and never get stuck too long on one question. By this time, you should have a pretty good intuitive feel for how GRE questions sound and some of the common tricks and twists you have to be on your guard against. Hopefully you’re now at the point where your eyes seem to home in by instinct on the relevant information in a passage or question, helping you to move through each section smoothly and efficiently.
T-minus 1. On the day before the test, if at all possible, REST. You can still do some review and polishing, but don’t wear yourself out. Of course, it depends on your particular situation and learning style. Some people do fine cramming up till the very last minute. Or you may feel that you have no choice but to work as hard as you can all the way down to the wire. But know yourself and your limits. Will the extra prep be enough to compensate for being somewhat exhausted on test day? Sometimes if you’re fresh and alert from a good night’s sleep, your brain will simply be faster and more accurate even with slightly less study and review. Also a factor is eye fatigue-- if you’re running very low on sleep, you’ll probably get blurry-eyed faster.
Think positive thoughts, eat well, call and talk to family or friends, read a book, see a movie, go for a swim-- do whatever works best for you to relax and depressurize for awhile. Just think, tomorrow you’ll have it over and done with: that’s something to look forward to and should put a smile on your face!
T-minus-0. With a rocket launch, this is the point where they say “ignition!” And that’s what you want to do: light a spark to all of the test prep facts and skills you’ve fueled your brain with and launch into the test. Keep alert and constantly refer back to the mental notes you’ve made as to general strategies to use and common tricks and traps to avoid-- think of it as a mental checklist to run through on each question. Keep moving at a steady pace and “mark and review” any problems that threaten to slow you down. Use process of elimination and keep track of the elimination process using a simple grid drawn on your scratch paper. Even on a question that you mark for review, try to eliminate a choice or two; that will save you time when you come back to the question for a second try. If you start to feel tired, try closing your eyes and cupping your hands over them for a few seconds, and breath in and out deeply a few times. Roll your shoulders from time to time and try to keep your muscles from tensing up too much.
Good luck, and best wishes for a "great flight" and "happy landings" on the GRE!
P.S. By the way, here are some alternative ways to use the computer-based practice tests if you’re extra crunched for time:
1. Skip the written section. Practice for writing later as explained above.
2. There’s a time limit on each test section, but if you’re really in a hurry, you can move through even faster. On any questions that you’re not sure how to do, guess quickly (or even immediately if you’re in an extra big rush) and move on through the test, just spending substantial time on the questions you know how to do. Mark down the number of each question you had to guess on. Once you finish the test, the software will take you through a review of any questions you got wrong. Your notes will allow you to also review any questions you happened to guess correctly.
3. If you need to shave off even more time, skip an entire section of the test. Keep in mind that this is a somewhat radical strategy for saving time and could backfire. Only do this if you are extremely pressed for time or if you are already very confident on the subject matter of the section you skip. Be careful not to sell yourself short: often an area you’re already strong in can be made even stronger, boosting your overall score. Also keep in mind that even if you’re an excellent math student (for example) you may end up missing questions on the Quantitative Reasoning section simply because they’re asked in a different way than you’re used to or because there’s a “trick” aspect to the
