Making Your Plan
How to Get Where You Want to Go
As you decide which graduate schools you intend to apply to, your GRE goals should be based largely on the credentials needed to win admission to the school (s) of your choice.
How can you make sure that your GRE scores will be a help rather than a hindrance to you when you apply to graduate schools? What steps can you take to close the gap that may exist between your current levels of GRE skills and the ones you’ll need to earn your highest possible score?
The Unofficial Route to Top Scores
There are three levels of skill that can help boost your GRE scores. Each requires a different kind of preparation. Most important, each requires a different time frame to be completely developed. If you want to reach your full potential on the GRE, you’ll want to devote time and energy to all three levels of skill.
Here’s how the three levels work.
Level One-Testwiseness (30 to 150 points)
This first level of test-taking skill is the “low-hanging fruit” of test preparation: skills that are relatively quick and simple to learn that can rapidly boost your total GRE scores from 30 to 150 points.
Level One includes such skills as:
- Familiarity with the format, structure, and question types found on the exam
- Ability to budget your time wisely as you work each section of the exam
- Understanding of the Computer Adaptive Test format and how to make it work for you
Level One skills are specific to the GRE. A student who’d never seen a standardized exam before and had done no preparatory reading about the GRE would lack these skills, and therefore would lose points through sheer ignorance of the game.
Fortunately, Level One skills are easy to learn. Many students pick up some of them just by taking a GRE exam. That’s why, as the test-makers admit, most students increase their scores by 30 to 50 points whenever they take the exam a second time, even if they do not studying between the two tests.
If your preparation for the GRE is condensed into just a couple of weeks, you’ll need to focus especially on Level One skills.
Level Two Strategies (75 to 250 points)
Skills at this level are a bit more complex. They generally take longer to learn, but have a correspondingly greater payoff. If you work to improve your Level Two skills (as well as your Level One skills), you can expect to boost your overall GRE scores by anywhere from 75 to 250 points.
Level Two includes such skills as:
- Knowing how to interpret the relationships between words on analogy questions
- Ability to recognize the logical connections between parts of a sentence or a reading passage
- Awareness of how and when to use rounding off and “guesstimating” when working on math problems
- Understanding of the technique of “plugging in numbers” in quantitative comparison questions
- Knowing to create a simple diagram that will help you to solve an analytical ability puzzle
- Gaining the ability to develop a clear, simple outline that will help you write an effective essay in 30 minutes or less.
Level Two skills relate specifically to particular question types on the GRE. However, they involve intellectual abilities that can be used in other contexts as well. For instance, if you’re good at seeing the logical connections between parts of a reading passage, this will help you not only on the GRE but whenever you do any difficult reading-in a textbook or scholarly journal, for example. You’ve probably developed some Level Two skills already, both in and out of school. However, you probably aren’t aware of how to apply these skills directly to answering GRE questions. Because these skills are somewhat complex (and because there are many of the them), it’ll take you a while to master them. But the rewards can be great.
If you have four weeks or more to prepare for the GRE, you’ll have enough time to delve fairly deeply into Level Two skills.
Level Three-Broad-Based Verbal and math Abilities (150 to 600 points)
These are the most general skills, and they take the longest time to fully develop. In a sense, Level Three skills are the ones the test-makers originally intended the GRE to focus on, and certainly your performance on the test will be heavily affected by your Level Three skills. If you devote significant time and effort in improving your Level Three skills (along with Levels One and Two), you can aim for an increase of your overall GRE scores of from 150 to 600 points.
Level Three includes such skills as:
- Knowledge of the meanings and correct usage of a large number of difficult English words
- The ability to read and understand complex passages dealing with challenging topics from science, the humanities, the social sciences, and literature
- Familiarity with the basic facts, principles, and procedures of arithmetic, algebra, and geometry
- The ability to quickly recognize numerical relationships and to manipulate them accurately and creatively
- A sophisticated understanding of logical reasoning and the fallacies that can undermine an argument
Level Three skills clearly go well beyond the requirements of the GRE exam. In fact, you probably learned and practiced skills like these in every high school and college you ever took (well, may be no in gym class).
You’ll continue to develop and improve your Level Three skills in many ways between now and when you take the GRE: through your ongoing college coursework; through challenging reading that you might do for school or any other purpose; and through the intellectual exercise you get whenever you take a test, including sample GRE exams you use as part of your test-prep program.
The more time you have between now and the exam, the greater your chances of improving your Level Three skills.