GRE® Quant: What Everyone Should Know

Today let's talk about the GRE quant section. There's definitely going to be quite a bit of variability from person to person in terms of strategy and how you should approach specific types of questions. But there are also things that are basically common to everyone and that's what I'm going to cover today. I'm going to start with the format, but I'm going to quickly gloss over that because you might already be familiar with that. And then we'll get into some specific recommendations about how you can optimize your performance on GRE quant and get the highest score possible with the fewest study hours. So logistics, the GRE always starts with an essay. We'll have separate essay coverage in another episode in the future. For now, just know that it's always the first section and currently it's 30 minutes long. Right after that, you'll see either a short quant or verbal section and that's randomized. And then after that will be another short quant or verbal section, also randomized. After that will be a longer quant or verbal section. And then after that will be a longer quant or verbal section. So you're going to see two quants and two verbals every time you take the exam, but the order is somewhat unpredictable in terms of what comes after the essay and where. So the short quant section is 12 questions in 21 minutes. So that's 1.75 minutes per question. The longer quant section is 15 questions in 26 minutes. That's 1.73 minutes per question. So basically one and three quarter minutes per question on quant sections. And we'll talk about verbal in another episode. There's four types of questions that can show up in a GRE quant section. There's a standard five option multiple choice, which many or all of you will be familiar with. Just A, B, C, D, E options. And I can only pick one. There's also something called a quantitative comparison question, which we'll have probably multiple episodes in the future about because it's kind of a deep topic and a lot of strategy involved. But for now, let's just stick with the format, which is you'll always have the same four options with every quantitative comparison question. And option A is always quantity A is always bigger. Option B is always quantity B is option bigger. Quantity B is always bigger. Option C is the quantities A and B are always equal. And option D is don't know. I don't have enough information to determine whether one or the other is always bigger or whether they're always equal. So to be clear, in a quantitative comparison, you're presented with two quantities, quantity A and quantity B. And your job is to figure out the relationship between them. Is one bigger? Is the other always bigger? Are they always equal or is there variability? And you can't tell what the relationship is 100% of the time. Again, we'll get deep on strategy and how to get good at those for now, just letting you know what's in there in case you're not already familiar with it. There's also multiple option questions where any or all of the options are possible. And the way you'll recognize that is you'll see a box, and when you click the box, there's an X for what you've selected. That lets you know that you could select more than one option. That's a little different than a standard five option multiple choice question, where most of us are used to only selecting one option. You've also got something called numeric entry, which is exactly what it sounds like. You type the answer to the question into the computer, and so it could be any number. So quite a bit more variability than a standard five option multiple choice question there on numeric entry questions, in terms of what you could answer. And then you will see data interpretation questions, and those present you with a data set and generally three questions on that set of data. Sometimes it's a couple graphs and charts. Sometimes it's an email from a manager to staff, coupled with a spreadsheet. There's all kinds of different data that they can throw at you. Generally, the questions are five option multiple choice, but there's no hard and fast rule that says it has to be that, and so technically it could be any of the question types on data interpretation. So that's what you're going to see every time you take a GRE quant section. Well, I should say that you may not see data interpretation in every single section. In fact, generally it's only in one of the sections, and there's no hard and fast rule that says that they have to put numeric entry in every single quant section you see. So there could be some variability there, just to clear that up. Let's say that those are the possible types of questions that you can see, and by and large you will see at least one of each every time you take the GRE. So that's format. In terms of content, what's tested is basically math up through high school level geometry. So it's usually not advanced math. There's no trigonometry, there's no calculus on the GRE, and the core topics tend to revolve around algebra, exponents and roots, arithmetic, like manipulating decimals and fractions and integers, and then basic counting and sequences math. And then you have things like word problems, like story problems, like a real world situation that you have to use math to resolve somehow. And I'm kind of staying at the high level and not getting too deep into the weeds there, because again, the way you conceptualize that might be a little more personal. This is for a more general audience, but just trying to let you know what to expect, and then we'll use that information to help you prepare more effectively. You're probably going to want to do some studying to either learn the content of the exam if you never learned some of that stuff, or relearn the content of the exam, which is the case for most of us. For most of us, we've been out of school for a while, or it might've just been a while since we've done math by hand, like exponent and root math, or geometry, for that matter. Even if you took... book, Math in Undergrad. So I think the important point here is you can learn all this stuff for free. And you can do it self-paced or you can make an investment and just check out our previous episode for investment recommendations. I guess it's probably good for me to say it's not financial advice I'm giving here. But just in the previous episode, I walk you through the different types of paid services you can get. And then I also make some recommendations around free services. And there's no right or wrong with that. It's just different strokes for different folks. So depending on your situation, there should be an option that you can find that's going to be a good fit for your situation. But if you can't find that, just reach out to us. Our contact information should be linked below in the description of this content. And we're happy to help as much as we possibly can. So, again, the point I want to make there is the math is relatively basic. There's a wide variety of ways to learn it, but that doesn't mean that the test is easy. And it also doesn't mean that you're not going to struggle to relearn that basic math. Some of us had really great math instruction as kids. Some of us didn't have such great math instruction as kids. And you might want to think about that and be honest with yourself about your level of comfort when it comes to choosing your preparation path. Some of you might want a little bit more support. Some of you might learn better with a more hands-off approach where you're just on your own doing your own thing. And personally, I just wish I had reflected on that back when I was in your shoes a little bit more because I kind of just dove into the familiar thing, which was books. And that wasn't really a great fit for me personally. Honestly, I think I would have done things a lot differently looking back and knowing what I know now. So, just trying to help you out with that as someone who's gone down the path ahead of you. But the other point I want to make is that the way that that content is tested on the exam can be kind of tricky. And so, the GRE doesn't really test your math abilities. That I think is kind of an important point to make because I think some people get in that initial practice test and it's not so good and they kind of start maybe reinforcing some old beliefs about themselves or stories that other people might've told them, such as you're never going to be good at math, you suck at math, you're too slow, whatever. And I always like to remind people the GRE is not an intelligence test. It doesn't test how smart you are. It doesn't test how successful you're going to be. It just tests one thing. It tests how good you are at taking the GRE. That's it. It's its own little game with its own little rules and quirks. And that's why we're putting this content out for free to try to help you see that for what it is and so that you don't internalize any of this stuff and make it about you. It's usually not about you. It's usually about your system and your strategy and your approach. And if you have a good system, strategy, and approach, you'll probably perform well. Or you'll at least improve, even if you're starting at a really tough point. And that's okay. Many people have started at really tough points, started lower than they thought they were going to, and they just stuck it out, stayed in the game, re-strategized a couple times and got the win. And if this is important enough for you, then I encourage you to do the same. It may be fun and easy, or it may not be the most fun or easiest thing you've ever done, but it is definitely doable. It's definitely doable. And it's really, really important to enforce that for people from the beginning of prep, especially when you're going back to some of this math that might have some painful associations with it from earlier on in your academic career. And that's totally, totally normal. And you can totally transcend that. Next important point is that you do have access to a calculator in the GRE quant sections. And a lot of folks say not to use the calculator, but I strongly disagree. I think it's more about learning to use the calculator well, rather than using it or not using it. So let me give you a little bit of advice around that. Number one, the calculator hides itself every time you move to the next question. So you're going to have to re-show it. And I've noticed a lot of people just forget it's there, even though they've found it really, really valuable in their practice and tend to get better results using it in their practice. It's just the stress of the real exam kind of gets to them. So if you find using the calculator and the advice I'm about to give you helpful, then just make the habit of re-showing the calculator on every new question and then move it around or hide it if it's blocking something that you need to see and then immediately re-show it. And that'll, it's kind of, it seems like kind of a random tip, but I've seen it help a lot of people. Another tip you can use for using the calculator well is practice typing into the calculator using your keyboard, not clicking using the mouse. So I think the argument that a lot of people have against the calculator is that it slows you down too much. That might be true in some cases, but I think you'll find that if you experiment enough that speed is probably not the number one bottleneck for you in the quant section. That speed is a bottleneck for a lot of people and there's significant time pressure. And even at my level, being a professional doing this for long, long, long, long time, I sometimes still have time trouble in the quant section and I'm not comfortable. Like I'm still like needing to go a little faster than I would ideally like to. And so I've developed a lot of strategies around that and I'll share a lot of those with you in this episode and future episodes. But typing into the calculator is something I've found to be really helpful. It takes a little bit of practice, but it greatly speeds people up and it really reduces the error rate with the calculator as well. And I've found that a lot of people who struggle with basic math really benefit from the calculator. Like their scores go up, they're less stressed, they feel like they've got a kind of like a little friend during the section. or something like a phone a friend option or something. And I kind of like thinking about it because I think the test environment can be stressful. I think the test format can be stressful. I think the preparation process can be stressful. So anything we can do to make the process easier and more supportive for ourselves, I think is a good thing. And I've seen a lot of really credible professionals like beat the mental math thing into their clients. And I think the mental math thing is a good fit for like a very small number of people. Like the vast majority of clients I've coached to use the calculator and not do any math in their head, their scores have gone up like a significant amount. And that's a lot of people who have come to me after working with other tutors or other providers who tried to like punish them for using the calculator. So what I'm trying to say is I encourage you to do your own research and at least experiment with it and give it a shot. And I think you'll really like it if you work on using it well, not if you try it once with the mouse and be like, oh, this is kind of clunky. I'm gonna do the mental math thing. I think the mental math thing is really error prone for a lot of people. And we'll circle back on that point in a minute because usually the main bottleneck, like I said, is not speed, it's missing questions you know how to do. That's been my experience. I know that's very unexpected if you haven't been studying for a while, but if you have been studying for a while and you haven't been seeing the success you want in the quant section, I think you'll probably recognize the truth of that. Now, having said all that about the calculator, I have still found clear hand computation like writing out your work in algebra steps to be extremely, extremely critical because the calculator can't do algebra or manipulate variables for you. So you're still gonna have to do some of that manual manipulation. And it's just really, really common under time pressure for people to know how to do the math and then make a mistake like dropping a negative sign or misplacing a parentheses or something like that. It's super, super common. And if you think about it, if you don't control those misses, then your score will never truly represent your capabilities. And that's not good. That's the opposite reason that you're here. And that's the opposite reason that you're preparing for this thing in the first place. You want your score to at the very minimum reflect your actual capabilities. And so I encourage you to adopt good organized scratch work techniques in your math practice from the very beginning of your prep, or if you've been preparing for a while to immediately implement that. And a good metric for knowing if your scratch work is clear enough or not is someone else could look at what you wrote down and tell exactly how you thought through the problem just from looking at what you wrote down and not having to ask you any questions. That's a high bar, but a very, very good bar to aim for. And don't worry if that's slow at the beginning, you will eventually get fast at doing it well. But if you never take the time to do it well, it's extremely unlikely that you will get fast and good. You might just get fast and like still kind of error prone. And that's the mistake I made when I was back in your shoes, the number one mistake. And I wish someone had just been like, hey man, have you thought about writing things down a little bit better? You know, like that's probably all it would have taken, but I just, it was hard for me to self-reflect. You know, I was just, I had a full-time job, had a lot of stuff going on in my personal life. I mean, it was just like a tough season. So even if some of this advice is obvious, I think sometimes it's still good to be reminded of it. So hopefully I'm doing you a solid there. It's probably worth making the point that in my experience, good scratch work and not missing questions you know how to do, tends to move people's quant scores more than learning how to do like crazy hard questions. It's not that learning how to do crazy hard questions is bad. It's just that that's probably not the foundation of a great quant score for you. The foundation of a great quant score is never missing easy and medium questions. And if you can get to that level, then that's a good place to start attacking the hards. But I've found a lot of people go straight to the hards and that ends up being very inefficient in their prep. And then they have to backtrack to the easy and medium stuff, which kind of catches them off guard and by surprise. So I think you can save yourself a few months probably by just implementing good habits right now. A final tip on scratch work is from the very beginning, make sure you're practicing with a separate sheet of scrap paper. Meaning not like writing in a book or not writing like on the screen if you have like digital note-taking capabilities on your computer. And that's because you take the exam on a computer if you didn't know that, and your scrap paper is separate when you go take the exam. And if you haven't been practicing that way, it can be kind of a shock to the system on test day and it can really throw people off. And also like weirdly, again, kind of unexpected like transcribing things from the computer screen to the scrap paper is like a frequent place where people go off the rails and make mistakes. Like they just accidentally wrote eight instead of five and then all the math is correct for the rest of the problem. And I think that's because once we look at the computer and then transfer everything to the scrap pad, we kind of go into like execution mode and we're rarely double checking what's on the computer screen. And so just, again, building good habits from the beginning there I think is gonna serve you extremely well. Next point that's worth understanding is a little bit about how your score is calculated and how the adaptive algorithm works. It's definitely not worth focusing a lot of energy on, but it's worth being aware of because it could affect your prep approach and possibly could affect your strategy on test day, but more, it has a larger effect on how you prepare from the beginning. So I'm not gonna go super in depth on the technical aspects of this cause that's probably gonna be unhelpful, but I am going to just like touch on the main things that I think are gonna be useful for you. So. The short sections, the initial sections that come right after the essay, those are going to be what's called medium difficulty level. And broad strokes here is that means about a third of the questions are easy, a third of the questions are medium, and a third of the questions are hard. And they're not in order. They're randomly mixed up. So number one could be the hardest question in the section. Number six could be the easiest question in the section. You don't know about the difficulty level when it starts, but that's the rough mix of that first section. And depending on your performance in that first section, that's going to dictate how hard the second section is. So for example, if I do the essay and then I immediately get the first math section and I get 70% or better accuracy, rough numbers, but that's about right, then the next math section I see whenever that comes later in the exam is going to be hard, meaning there's going to be about half medium questions and half hard questions out of those 15 and probably zero easy questions. Again, kind of generalizing here, there can be some exceptions to that, but that's broadly accurate. However, if I perform a little worse on that first math section, let's say 40 to 70% accuracy, then the next math section I see later in the exam is going to be medium level. And again, that's one third easy, one third medium, one third hard. If I don't do so hot on that first math section and I get only 40% or fewer correct, then the follow-up math section later in exam is going to be easy, meaning about half easy questions and about half medium questions and few or no hard questions. And that affects your score. If your second section is easy level, then it's going to be pretty tough to score above 150, which is right around the mid range. And we'll get deeper into the percentiles and scores and what your targets go should be in future episodes, but I don't want to get bogged down by all those details here. I want to focus on quant and how you can do a good job preparing from the beginning. Now it's still doable to score above 150, but you're going to have to like really crush that second section. But let's think about that and let's step back for a second. Let's say you just need a 145 or a 150 to get into your target program. Well, that's like the best news ever because now I just told you, you never have to get any hard questions right ever. You could guess on any hard question in the entire exam, get them all wrong and still hit your target score with room to breathe. In fact, to get a 150, if you got all the easies right, and maybe half to slightly more than half of the mediums, you're pretty much good to go. So the good news there is you don't have to do any hard questions in your prep at all. So that could save you months and months and months, at least hours. And during the exam, you can make it a lot less stressful on yourself because if it's a hard question, you can just and move on and just never leave anything blank in any section of the GRE because there's no guessing penalty. And if you leave a blank, it's 0% chance of getting it right. If you bubble it, at least it's more than 0% chance of getting it right. That's why I'm saying we don't need to go. deep on the technical aspects of the algorithm and scoring system, but knowing that versus your score goal could really help you plan your prep better and save you a lot of time, which is my goal for this content. If you need higher than a 150 though, you're going to need to invest a lot of energy in never missing easy or medium questions. And then you'll probably need to be able to get at least a few of the hard questions right. It's not absolutely critical, but it's helpful. It's helpful if you can get at least a few hard questions right, but you don't need to dominate the hard questions if you're going for a 155 to 160, let's say. And again, that's really, really good news because if you're just going for a 158 or something for your target program, that means if something's really tough during the exam, you can just guess it. And if you have time, come back later. If you don't have time, no big deal. Don't need that question to see the score you want. And during your prep time, you can pass over anything that seems like a challenge question or like a super hard, making me sweat while I'm trying to figure it out type question. And again, that can save you just lots and lots and lots of study time and a lot of stress and a lot of self-judgment of like, oh my gosh, this is so hard, I'm never going to do this. Like those low moments can be tough, so it's nice to just be able to delete them depending on your score goals. Now some of you are going to be going for really elite scores, really elite, highly competitive programs. And if that's you and you want to score above 160 in the quant, then basically you need to never miss easy and medium questions. That's really, really important, like I was talking about before. And you'll probably need to get at least about half of the hard questions right. You don't need perfection. That's really, really important. You can still miss a couple of questions and get a 165 or better in the quant, which is 90th percentile. And like after that, it's probably not helping that much unless you're applying to like PhD in math programs or PhD in computer science programs, some of which are extremely competitive on the math section. But even then, like a 165, 167, people who are great at math are going to understand their statistical variance in the exam. So like we could make the argument that maybe it's not that big of a deal. But if you're applying to those programs, you're probably pretty stoked to learn some GRE math or you came out of the womb and GRE math is no big deal for you. So that's cool too. That's cool too. And it takes all shapes and sizes of us to make the world go around as it were. So hats off to all of you. But in general, to get a 160 plus, like a 163, which would be competitive at almost any graduate school, you don't need perfection. You can miss some questions. And so you're going to want to be a little strategic about what questions you choose to invest in and what questions you choose to maybe divest if you have time trouble during the math section. And that's going to come down more to your personal strategy or personal strengths and But what I want to do is I just want to raise that flag for you at the beginning of just paying attention to that as you go through your prep, like, oh, I tend to miss a lot of these hard geometry questions or these really hard geometry questions tend to take me a long time. And here's how I could recognize they're going to take me four minutes each. And so I'll just like pass on one of those if I see it. And that'll free me up to do a better job on the rest of the section. And I don't need perfection. It's okay if I miss one or two questions. I can still hit my goal score. And I think that's really, really helpful to know from the very beginning. Now it's worth saying that if you want those elite results, you may have to invest elite effort or just have elite talent. And of course, elite talent is hard to control. If you can time travel back in time and get different genetics, I mean, you know, it's probably going to work, but I haven't seen that technology work as of today. So we kind of got what we got on the hardware side. And so that's why we're here right now to help you optimize the software and programming side and upscaling side. So yes, you do need to be extremely good to get those high, high scores, either extremely talented or extremely hardworking, or maybe a blend of both. So again, understanding the algorithm affects your prep strategy quite a bit and affects your performance strategy a little bit. So again, worth knowing, worth building around from the beginning, but not worth obsessing over. Like not worth the 2am deep dive on how the GRE scoring algorithm works, like very little value there because at the end of the day, it's really still about nailing what you know and not investing too much time in the things you don't know. It's you got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them on the GRE quant section. That's a good way to think about that. So again, if you have questions about the details there, you can reach us at the contact info below, but that's probably already more than enough, but hopefully like good solid coverage that helps you make good productive decisions as you move forward here. So expanding on the study strategy piece, early on in your prep, I'd highly recommend not doing full sets of questions. Just do individual questions, stop the timer, check the answer, review, learn what you can from that question, and then move on to the next question. And I think some people get really ambitious from the beginning of their prep and they want to jump right into like full time sets. And I've seen that create a lot of inefficiency because if there's a problem you need to address, you don't want that problem to compound on 10 more problems before you fix it. Instead, you want to just fix it and then have the good habit manifest on the next six questions that you do during that prep session. So there's a lot of positive versus negative compounding there, and that's worth reflecting on at the beginning. Now, a good metric is after you've touched every topic on the quant section once, either in a free program or a paid program, that's a good time to move to time sets where you're blending all the topics together. And I'd recommend just starting with easy level questions, using a count up timer, and then targeting maybe 80% or so in those time sets before moving up to the next highest difficulty level. And if you're preparing for free on your own with no guidance and no paid structure, then you'll usually want two 80% or better accuracy sets back to back within the time constraints of the exam. So 1.75 minutes or faster on average, before you move up to the next difficulty level. That's like a good check mark that you've fully mastered that difficulty level or mastered. mastered it enough to move up to the next level that's that's not true for everybody and if you're working with a coach who recommends you do something different than I highly recommend listening to your coach but that's just for people who don't have any guidance that's something I wish someone gave me because I tried to do this all on my own and that that was really really hard obviously things worked out and I got it done but like I could have just really used some help so you can use the same metrics for medium you can use the same metrics for hard you can use the same metrics for ultra hard if you want 80% or better accuracy back to back with test time what I recommend on the timing thing is when you move to time set start with a count up timer and then to get faster compete with your own personal previous set don't go from count up timer to count down timer that has test constraints that's that usually is where all your good habits you develop go out the window we don't want that that's going to create a lot of inefficiency you're gonna have to rebuild a lot of habits usually so instead start with the count up timer be like okay that's my natural pace next set let me see if I can be one second faster than that okay next set let me see if I can be one second faster than than the previous one okay next set let me see if I can be one faster than that and that's a good way to gradually work your speed up while not losing all the good habits that you've developed through the rest of your early parts of your prep for those of you using paid resources you're probably in good shape especially if you took my advice from the previous episode for those of you using free resources things like Khan Academy are really useful things like web searching study plans can be helpful and honestly some of the modern free AI that's coming out now is not terrible it used to be terrible with study planning it still makes mistakes so we'll probably do a full episode on AI but for now if you're using free AI I would say use it for basic math drills and verbal help but not for creating sample GRE problems it's very not good at that it's not good at simulating real GRE problems but it can be it can be okay at explaining math concepts but it frequently makes mistakes with math so there I think you're probably better off with a web search on the quant side on the verbal side with you can actually get some pretty good results so it's definitely a good option if you can afford some paid AI products then just web search how to turn on extended thinking and always have extended thinking turned on if you're using paid AI products for a GRE prep and that way you'll get some better quant explanations and some better verbal explanations it's still not great at simulating real GRE questions so I wouldn't use it for that I would use a web search for human validated pre validated GRE questions for now and we'll update you if that changes maybe you know version 2020 or whatever of these things is coming out tomorrow and it's going to be a hundred times better than I will ever be at anything who knows but so far that's that's where we're at right now okay Okay, so timing can be a big problem for people on GREQuant, and I've found that it's usually the individual question time awareness that's the problem. Usually the overall time, people can manage it pretty well and they tend to keep track of it well, but what happens is you might get sucked into a problem for like four minutes and then be like, oh shoot, I didn't even realize I spent all that time, and then you're really pressed for the rest of the session. So a good system for helping with that is something I like to call the one, two, three rule of individual question timing. And the one represents the first minute that you're looking at the question. And you could think about this like a first date with the question. You're kind of getting to know the question, just surveying the scene. How do I feel about this? Does it seem like it could be a fit? What's going on here? Are there any major red flags where I should just excuse myself and leave? Things like, I can't understand what the question is telling me or asking me, bail. I'm out of there. It's not a good idea to invest in something that's probably not going to pay off. Having said that, if the first date goes well, maybe I would consider a second date. And that's where the second minute comes up. So after the first minute, if you're feeling like, okay, maybe I recognize this, I've got this, that this is familiar, I've seen something like this in my practice, then that second minute can help you assess whether you have really good traction on the problem. Is my strategy working? Am I more than 50% likely to get this right? Then I'll continue working on it, maybe even into the third minute on certain questions if I have high conviction. But if after a couple of minutes, my first strategy didn't pan out and I'm like, ooh, maybe I don't know how to do this, then the best thing I can do is just bail out. And again, the dating analogy is good there. It's like, if the first date goes great, but the second date, they're totally crazy. And they're like, yeah, I only believe, you know, something nuts that's like totally incompatible with you and your beliefs and what you're looking for in a romantic partner, then it's just time to go. Yeah. Like we should just see other people. It's no big deal. It's nothing personal, Mr. or Mrs. question. You know, it's just maybe we should see other questions, you know, that kind of thing. So the three is the third minute. And a good rule of thumb is no GRE questions are worth more than three minutes. That's a really good rule of thumb. There's a little bit of flexibility there, like the first question on a reading comp passage that's long, for example, you might need four minutes to knock that one out. And that might pay off because maybe you're faster on the follow-up questions. But by and large, three minutes is a good, just flat ceiling. And if you're hitting three minutes, even if you get the question, right, that's one question for the price of two. And that's just a bad bargain. Unless you're flying through the rest of the section and you've got tons of extra time on the clock, it's just a really, really bad bet. And it's better to just give that away. You could think about it as an investment that's too expensive. Yeah, maybe you could make a 0.0000001% return on it. But the opportunity cost of the other investments you could have made is worth millions and millions and millions of dollars. Like we don't want to make those trades. Those are bad trades. So a tool that you can use to practice this one, two, three minute awareness. is something called an interval timer. And you can web search them, there's plenty out there. I mean, shoot, you could use some of these AI coding tools to code up one for yourself that's personalized to you and only uses, I don't know, like Disney sounds or something like that. I mean, go nuts if that's your thing. But if you want one that's pre-made, there's one at online-stopwatch.com. And we'll try to put that link in the description. Apologies if that website or company goes out of business at some point, but at that point you can probably code your own using any AI or just like, you know, talk to your phone and it'll make a timer out for you. But the idea that with that interval timer is you can set a one, two and three minute interval timer with different sounds. And you might be surprised that one to two weeks of work with that can get you a really, really good gut feel for what one, two and three minutes feels like. So if you struggle with getting lost on individual questions, which I talk to a lot of people every year who do get really sucked into questions, that's a great, great fix for that. I mentioned that overall section pacing is less of an issue for people than individual question pacing, but it still pays to have at least a good strategy for overall section pacing. And I think the best strategy there is extremely simple, which is just answer everything that's easy on your first pass, guess on everything else that's hard on your first pass, and then go back and pick whatever seems gettable with your remaining time. Like just keep it really, really, really simple. Like just make sure you answer all the questions that are easy for you and that you know how to do on that first pass through the section, make sure you have plenty of time for those, don't miss anything you know. And then think of the second pass through the section as like bonus points, icing on the cake. And I probably wouldn't make it more complicated than that unless you have a really top coach who's working with you who has some really, really slick stuff that they want you to try. The other point to make there is just having some simple benchmarks to know if you're ahead or behind. The best system that I find myself recommending the most is four questions in seven minutes for quant, so seven minutes for every four questions in quant, and then seven minutes for every five questions in verbal. And that's because vocab questions usually go a little faster, RC goes a little slower. So the timing benchmarks might be a little more fluid in verbal, in quant it's a little more predictable. But again, seven minutes for every four questions in quant. If you memorize that, you'll always be able to re-vector and figure out whether you're ahead or behind the clock for the overall section. And then seven minutes for every five questions in verbal. I've had a lot of success with that. Really simple, really memorable. You can write it on your scratch page at the beginning of the test if you want, if you're worried about forgetting it. And you can make a little table if you get lost or behind. But that's pretty much it as far as like broadly applicable, really useful stuff for timing. And I've found that like simple works well on the GRE, simple scales, fancy fails on the GRE. Now, some of you might still be deciding between GRE and GMAT, and most of you probably have committed to GRE, so that's why I put this at the end, and I'll just tie it off with some general advice here in just a minute, and I'll gloss over the GRE versus GMAT thing because we've already got a full episode with a deep dive on how to make that decision on our GMAT podcast feed, so we'll link that below for you. But the main factor is just if the school accepts both. That's probably painfully obvious, but if you haven't web searched that, you should, because if your school only accepts GRE, that's a really easy decision, or vice versa with GMAT. But the short version is if you're good with geometry and vocabulary, the GRE is probably going to be a really good bet. And if you need super fast results where you're not going to have time to memorize thousands of words, and you're not so great with geometry, then you're probably going to have better success with the GMAT. Now, the GMAT has a lot more data questions, so that's also a factor. If you're good with data, GMAT could play to your strengths. If you're not so great with complex data and piecing that together under time pressure, then you might find the fewer data questions on the GRE to be better. Again, we'll link the deep dive for you if you need it later, but just wanted to touch on that in case you're still on the fence there. So a little bit of parting advice that I've had a lot of success with over the years. I think it's a good idea just to mentally plan to take the exam two to three times. And it's not because you want to plan for failure. It's because luck is a factor in these tests. And I think it's just good to plan for that from the very beginning. And I think it takes the pressure off that first exam knowing you could take it another time or two. And I think that tends to lead to better first exam performances, honestly. So paradoxically, believing that you might have to do it two or three times makes you more likely to not have to do it two or three times. And yeah, it's a quick tip to give. It's an easy thing to remember, and I think it matters. More on the luck thing, there's lots of words in English, and there's no pre-prescribed list that says they're going to test these words and not these other English words. And basically, nobody knows every single word in English. And so you might get some sections that really favor the words you studied, and you might get some sections that don't favor the words you studied. And I think that's particularly true on the verbal side, but there's some random selection in the math as well. And you might get a few geometry concepts on your math section that you didn't cover very well in your practice. And then the next time you take the exam, it might be all strength area stuff or all stuff that you studied. So I think just planning to have that two or three reps in the back of your mind, even if you knock it out the first time, is just valuable, just helpful. Second piece of advice is difficult to follow for most people, but I recommend either being fully in study mode at the desk, or if you're on the go studying vocab flashcards, or fully not in study mode and like fully working or fully hanging out with your buddies or fully doing your own thing. And not being in this half studying half chilling mindset that a lot of people get in where they start kind of clicking on random GRE. YouTube videos or or reddit posts it's not that those things can't teach you stuff it's just that not all internet advice is equally valid and we've all had that experience and sometimes it's just really really really hard to tell if the advice you're getting is really good for you personally or not and I'm not even saying like people out there give bad advice although that does happen sometimes but it's actually pretty rare I think most people in the space are pretty well intentioned and they're trying to give good advice but their advice might not apply to your specific situation and so if if you have a structured program and you're doing it for free you're probably really good at self-assessing you're probably really good at that if you have a paid program they're probably really good at assessing you or helping you assess yourself and they probably have tools for that but if you're in the middle and it's kind of just this random provider a provider B provider CEO this seems like an interesting kind of topic you know I'll click on that I've found that to be counterproductive because it can work against some of the stuff that you you from a structured point of view would have just not even needed to deal with or think about in the first place if you were just all in and all out with your study time so I've found it to be a bad use of time I think if you're like oh I'm kind of tired but you know maybe I'll watch this YouTube video it's probably better to just like fully chill and and not do GRE at all and then save that energy to be all in on your next study session that's what I've found works best for most people finally if you're struggling with some of the official guide explanations which sometimes are great sometimes are bad then web searching alternate explanations can be really really helpful I already talked about free AI versus paid AI which obviously is an incredible resource that it seems like virtually everybody is using these days and personally I'm a huge fan of that I think access to great education as has been far too scarce for far too long and I think AI can change that of course we all need to think about as as leaders in society or potential leaders in society we need to think about how we can make that technology go well for everybody but by and large it has a ton of positive potential in my opinion and of course many many downsides and the debate is important and and all of that is healthy and and eventually we seem to figure these things out over time as a human race but by and large for now I don't think it's about using it or not using it or being pro AI or anti AI I think it's about using it well just like I talked about with the calculator so again free AI is good for basic basic basic math drills and verbal help and bad for advanced math help and it's bad for simulating real GRE questions paid AI if you turn on extended thinking which you should be able to web search how to do with your preferred paid AI provider will help on the math side that can make it a better math explainer of questions to you but it's and it will make it a better verbal explainer as well but it still will not be good at simulating real GRE questions so for that I recommend using human validated stuff for now That's, I think, the most helpful, widely applicable GRE episode I can put together for you. If you have questions on any of this, like I said multiple times, our contact info is linked below. We love hearing from you, so don't hesitate to reach out if you do have questions. And if you want more tips and strategies for optimizing your performance on the GRE, just head to our website, thegrestrategy.com. If you like the information I am providing here, then consider subscribing, but if not, it's all good. And at the very least, please stay positive and stay consistent with your studies. You becoming a more successful person is really, really important, despite what a lot of weirdly entrenched interests might say or proselytize online, saying we don't need more successful people. We absolutely need as many successful humans as we can possibly get. And I'm really, really happy that you're taking on the challenge and improving yourself via education. And it's really important to me that you have resources to support that, given the energy that you're investing here. So please give us feedback. If you feel like we're coming up short anywhere, you can't hurt our feelings. We wanna hear from you. We wanna get better as well. And we're all in this together. Alrighty, everybody. Talk to you all soon.