Abstract
Rohan* became my student two weeks before the date he had booked for his third attempt at the GRE. His quant score had stagnated around 159 whereas he needed a 165. We worked exclusively with the official quant material. He put in 48 hours-plus of quant study over the two weeks and, in his third attempt at the GRE, scored 167 in Quant. The details of our study system are described in the second part of the article. In the third and the last part, two powerful prep strategies are discussed that led to Rohan’s impressive improvement in so short a time and that GRE students can take away for their own prep – (1) Mistake Analysis, and (2) Depth > Breadth.
* The name of the student changed, because he does not want his higher-studies plans to be known to his LinkedIn network at present.
In early 2022, I was thrilled to receive this message on LinkedIn from a GRE retaker in the USA:
He had probably come across my article through search results. I asked for his permission to share his message with this article, which he graciously gave, and in that later message, he also shared this additional detail:
“For me, it was definitely the most efficient way to prepare for the quant section of the test and was less stressful as it was a more confined but in-depth approach. The mistake analysis was especially helpful because I realized there were some basic algebra rules that I had forgotten.”
If Rohan’s improvement seems impressive to you, know that the credit goes not to me but to the prep strategies that, upon my suggestion, he diligently followed. The American student who messaged me was able to improve his score from Q159 to Q169 on his own, through self-study, by simply following the prep strategies shared here. I hope that they will serve you well too.
But first, let me tell you Rohan’s story.
Part 1: Rohan’s predicament
I first talked to Rohan on September 19, 2019 and could immediately sense from his voice how nervous he was about GRE quant. He was going to take the test for the third time on October 3, just thirteen days away, but was far off from his goal score still.
The average GRE score for his dream school was 162 in Verbal and 165 in quant. This 165 had proven to be frustratingly elusive. In both his earlier attempts – made in May 2019 and August 2019 – he had done well in verbal but, in quant, had got only 159 and 156 respectively. Now, to prepare for the third attempt, he had been taking mock tests from a test-prep company, which we shall call Company G. His quant score in these mocks had reached a 163 once but usually stayed between 155 and 160.
The upcoming attempt would be the last that Rohan could take before the application deadline for his dream school in the current admissions season. His profile was otherwise solid; a below-average quant score looked like the only thing that could hurt his chances at this school. He admitted his surprise that GRE quant had proved to be so challenging; he had always been an achiever in academics and had also done well in GMAT quant six years ago, and doesn’t everybody say that the GMAT is harder than the GRE?
When I asked him how he had prepared for his earlier attempts, he told me that:
- Before his first attempt, he had solved the official questions (Official Guide + Official Quant Reasoning Guide) and the entire quant section of the Manhattan 5-pound book. He had also taken the two free PowerPrep tests.
- Before the second attempt, he had worked only with company G’s material – he had revised quant concepts from their theory lessons and then taken their mock tests. He did not touch the official books and tests this time, because he thought he had “exhausted” them, having gone through them before the first attempt.
Now, for his third attempt, he had been preparing by taking still more mock tests from company G. When his score failed to improve, he had sought help from a counsellor at G. This person asked Rohan three questions:
- Had he studied the concepts?
- Had he solved the official questions and the questions in G’s database?
- Had he taken mocks?
When Rohan answered ‘yes’ to all, the counsellor said, “It is not abnormal for a student’s score to stagnate at one level. Just keep taking full-length mock tests every alternate day till your GRE date. There is nothing else that you can do about this situation.”
Having been given this sorry prognosis about his months of diligent prep, was it any wonder that Rohan sounded underconfident in that first phone call?
He told me that day that his challenges were two:
- He was not seeing improvement.
- He was running out of quality study material and tests.
His test was only 14 days away, and I told him that though there was some chance of his improving to 165, that chance was slim, and its realization depended on him studying every single day and sticking only to the official material from then on. I said:
“No more mocks, no more casting your net on the ocean of internet for practice questions or mock tests from anywhere. I will make you go through the official material again, systematically, topic-by-topic, and official material is all that we will do. We can work together only if you agree to this plan.”
Rohan said that as his earlier ways of study had not worked, he was ready to give this new approach a try.
And so, we got started.
Part 2: How we prepared
Rohan was a busy professional with a long commute, and there was not much time till the test. So, I was not sure if he would be able to go through the whole quant syllabus with me. We started with the most frequently tested topic – Ratio and Percent – and went on to other topics in decreasing order of frequency. I was pleasantly surprised when he finished within one day the pre-work that I had assigned to him after our conversation (22 questions). So, we had our first class on 21st September. He kept up this momentum through all subsequent homework assignments, and that was how, in 7 days flat, we had had 6 sessions together and had covered the entire syllabus. Such self-driven and diligent students are any teacher’s delight!
The Official Guide has 50 Quant questions (Chapter 6 – Sets 1, 2, 3 and 4) and the Official Guide to Quantitative Reasoning has 150 questions. These were the 200 questions that Rohan did with me, topic-wise, over that week. I’ll refer to these questions as the ‘official practice questions’ from hereon.
The system we followed was this:
1. In the pre-work I assigned to him for a session:
- I informed him of the theory topics for that session and pointed him to the relevant pages of the ‘Math Review’ chapter of the Official Guide. I advised him to revise these topics before starting with the questions. He later told me that carefully going through, and understanding, each line of the ‘Math Review’ chapter had helped him a lot in feeling confident about the math concepts.
- I provided all official practice questions from these theory topics.
2. He let me know when he was done with the assigned questions, along with a report of his accuracy, the total time taken to solve the questions, the questions he had got wrong along with the reasons why, the questions he had not understood or had doubts in etc.
3. We then had a session in which I answered his doubts, made him reflect on why he had taken a particular approach instead of another, discussed his mistakes and suggested ways to avoid such mistakes in the future, and, if needed, gave him derivative questions (questions derived from the official questions) for further practice as the post-session work.
Except two or three topics where he needed to brush up on theory, Rohan made no conceptual mistakes. What brought his accuracy down were either “silly mistakes” or misunderstandings about a question because he had rushed to solve it without taking time to digest the question.
I pointed out the patterns in his mistakes and modelled the question-solving process he could follow. I also made him start calling “silly mistakes”, “tragic mistakes” instead. These mistakes were tragic indeed, for they were keeping him away from his goal score when, given his conceptual clarity and logical reasoning capability, he should have reached it.
Once our sessions were done, I encouraged him to attempt all the official practice questions yet once again (this would be his third round through these questions since he started GRE Prep, not counting the revisions), as there was still juice left in them to be extracted. I suggested that he take note of the mistakes he had done before and this time, and focus on noting those patterns and preventing them in the actual test.
This systematic revision of not just the relevant theory but also of his mistakes, mindfulness of his mistake-patterns, and the feeling of control that he got from this study-plan, all contributed to an improvement in not just his accuracy but also his confidence that he could get to his desired score.
In his call to me after taking the test, he said that this mistake analysis had really made him comfortable. During the test, he was alert about the traps he usually fell into, and so was able to consciously avoid them. He got a 167, two points above his goal score!
Here’s a session-wise breakdown of the number of questions I assigned to Rohan, the time he took to solve them, the duration of our meetings, and my estimates of the time Rohan would have spent in self-study/revision:
[Note about the table: The columns marked * are those for which I do not have the actual data; the numbers given here are my estimates of the time Rohan probably took doing that activity. Here is how I have estimated these numbers:
- ‘Theory Revision’ time – As Rohan had already prepared for the GRE twice, I have assumed that he did not need much time for theory revision. I have simply taken this time to be half of the time spent in solving the pre-work questions for a session.
- ‘Attempt Evaluation’ time – This is the time Rohan would have taken to check the answers and to read and understand the official solutions of the pre-work questions. I have estimated this time to be equal to the time spent in question solving (if you take 2 minutes to solve a question, chances are its solution will be long enough that you will take 2 minutes to understand it; if a question can be solved in only 30 seconds, its solution too is likely to be simple enough to be read and understood in 30 seconds. So, as a rule, I have assumed the ‘Attempt Evaluation’ time to be equal to the Q-solving time).
- ‘Revision of the Session’ time – This is the time that Rohan took to revise the video recording of a session and solve the derivative questions that I assigned to him for further practice of his weak topics or mistakes from that session. I have estimated this time to be equal to the duration of our session.
- ‘Final Revision’ time – This is the time he is likely to have spent during his last week before the test in revising all the material for a particular session one last time. I have estimated this time to be 70 percent of (Question solving + Attempt Evaluation + Session Revision) time, because you take less time to revise a thing the second time.
Rohan has vetted this table and confirmed that the estimates made here are reasonable.]
If Rohan’s improvement stats – eight points in fourteen days – seemed magical to you, look at the number of study-hours he racked up despite spending all day at work. In that marvelous discipline and diligence lies the secret of the magic.
Part 3. Two prep strategies for you
I have shared Rohan’s case-study with you to show the power of two underappreciated prep-strategies that can save you a lot of time, money and heartache on the GRE:
1. Mistake Analysis:
Identify your mistake patterns, devise strategies to avoid making the same kind of mistakes again, and then, practice those strategies till they become intuitive to you.
Could Rohan have diagnosed his tragic mistakes on his own? Certainly, and I sure hope that you, upon reading this article, will be motivated to do so. I only helped him see what would have been obvious to him had he looked. But he did not know to look. Till we started working together, he had thought that GRE prep meant solving questions; so, the sincere student that he was, he worked through stacks of questions and seldom took a second look at them.
It seems like a trivial decision on a day-to-day basis to choose between:
- solving 10 questions and revising them, and
- solving 10 questions, checking your answers and going on to solve another 5 questions.
In fact, the second option seems more fun; why go back to the old when you can get the new? Why look back when you can run ahead? Why mull over painful mistakes when you can hope for a shiny future?
The thing is that just hoping, just running, just doing more and more questions does not bring the shiny future and does not raise your score. Rohan improved only when he started to study his mistakes.
And remember, all mistakes are equal in the GRE. Most students think that conceptual mistakes are somehow more serious and more worthy of their attention than the “silly” mistakes.
This could be a hangover of the subjective marking scheme in our school math exams. There, you got 0/5 if you didn’t know how to solve a question at all, but 4.5/5 if you only made a mistake in one step.
But the GRE does not look at your scratch paper. The algorithm does not have a heart that will soften because you stumbled only at the last step of your solution. All that matters to it is that you input the wrong answer. So, do not trivialize your silly mistakes. Feel vexed at them, develop strategies to prevent them, and practice those strategies. This change in attitude about “silly” mistakes alone may bump up your score by a few points.
2. Depth > Breadth:
Many students believe in the ‘more is better’ fallacy – that the more books or courses they use, the more questions they solve, the more mock tests they take, the better prepared they will be. This mistaken notion has three unfortunate consequences:
- As there is only a finite number of official practice and test questions, students take it as a given that they must use additional books and/or courses for their prep. Take Rohan for example. Because he had done the official practice questions before his first attempt, he thought that he had used them up; so, he switched over to company G’s prep materials and did not touch the official questions again till I started coaching him.
After scoring 167 through solving and revising just the ETS material, Rohan said this about company G:
“This test-prep company prepares you to solve more difficult problems and those that require more calculation. The assumption is that you will find the GRE test easier and the accuracy in the test would be higher. This is so not effective.”
This observation holds true not just for G, but for most non-official prep materials. It is a wastage of time to solve hundreds of questions that are poor imitations of what you will actually face on the test day.
2. You can keep doing more and more and yet never feel satisfied that you have prepared well. The internet makes it possible for you to amass any number of books and questions (whatever their quality might be). You solve five hundred questions, but then someone you know on Reddit or on GRE Prep Club or among your friends says that he got a Q169 because he solved a thousand questions, and so, oh God, you haven’t done nearly enough and must scramble to do at least five hundred more questions! Never mind if you are doing these questions in topics that you are already good at or in topics that are rarely tested on the GRE; you’ve just got to run through these five hundred questions or else you’ll feel underprepared for the test, because others have done them and you haven’t.
3. All this running, all this frenzied solving of more and more and more questions keeps you away from Mistake Analysis, which can only happen in a space of quiet reflection and introspection. Good revision takes time.
Go back to the table above. Notice how the time that Rohan spent in solving the official questions (7 hours) was just about one-seventh of his total study-time (48 hours). This meant that for every hour that Rohan spent solving questions, he spent almost six hours in:
- revising the relevant theory,
- understanding the solutions of the questions he had solved,
- discussing the questions or his mistakes with me,
- revising our sessions, and finally,
- revising all these things once again.
Any student has only so much prep time available. They can use it to go either wide (cover a lot of material) or deep (do repeated attempts of and thorough mistake analysis of limited amount of material).
Till Rohan kept going wide, his understanding (of theory and of his weaknesses) remained shallow. Once he started going deeper into a limited amount of material, his score improved significantly. The finitude of the official material is its virtue, not a drawback.
Through Rohan’s case-study, I hope to have demonstrated to you the power of Mistake Analysis and of going deeper into limited (official) material instead of spreading yourself thin over a maddening breadth of materials.
I will leave you with this quote by the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc:
“Everybody knows that one can increase what one has of knowledge or of any other possession by going outwards and outwards; but what is also true, and what people know less, is that one can increase it by going inwards and inwards.”
Hilaire Belloc
Written by Japinder Kaur; also published on LinkedIn.