The Big Picture In last week’s post, we discussed three key elements of success on GRE Quant. To recap, there are many worthwhile and effective strategies and approaches to Quant problems, but there are principles that undergird a great deal of success on Quant. The principles discussed comprised three different ways to approach Quant problems […]
Power Vocabulary Webinar Preview
Res, non verba Tonight at 8:00 pm Eastern, we continue our free GRE Webinar series with a discussion of the importance of vocabulary on the GRE and how to master both the content and approach necessary to ace GRE Verbal. Just as some students view math on GRE Quant as an insurmountable edifice of facts and formulas, […]
Quantitative: Mind-Melting Arithmetic
Calculator Malfunction! The GRE lets you use a calculator. Hooray! But wait, there’s a catch. You can’t bring your own calculator. No, you’re stuck with the equivalent of a 1987 Windows 2.0 on-screen calculator. Worse still, ETS sometimes seems to go out of its way to make sure that you can’t solve the problems using […]
Quantitative: Simple and Compound Interest
How to Prepare for Less Common Quant Topics: With limited time and a lot to cover, a difficult choice many GRE students face is how much time to devote to the “errata” of the GRE Quant section. Among the more difficult problems, the GRE may throw students a curve ball: perhaps a difficult probability question, […]
GRE vs. GMAT: The Swiss Army Knife of Tests
The Swiss Army Knife of Tests With the news yesterday that Harvard Law School will join the pilot program of accepting the GRE for admissions, now is a good time to revisit the status of the GRE for business school admissions and the seemingly unstoppable expansion of the GRE into ever broader graduate admissions uses. For the purposes […]
EdTech and the GRE
What is EdTech? While you may have never heard the term, you have almost certainly used “EdTech.” Short for Educational Technology, according to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, EdTech is “the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources.” Everything from trendy quiz apps to educational […]
Vocab Journaling: Let’s do it!
In my last post I discussed the importance of vocabulary, not as an exercise to be done in isolation but instead as a habitual tool for learning and reinforcing unknown or unfamiliar words you come across. As I noted, this skill translates not only into improvements on Sentence Completion and Equivalence problems but also on Reading Comprehension, […]
GRE Vocabulary: The Sage Continues…
THE NEVERENDING STORY: There were some pretty strange children’s movies when I was a kid. Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, the so-bad-it’s-good Ron Howard movie Willow (featuring Real Genius and Top Gun star Val Kilmer), and the still-disturbing leporine epic Watership Down. But insofar as capturing the imagination of the archetypical misunderstood eight-year-old (imagine the eighties version of Harry Potter), nothing surpassed The Neverending Story, […]
Algebra Challenge: Quadratics and Negative Exponents
GRE algebra questions will occasionally hit you with a quadratic equation. To solve it, you won’t need the quadratic formula. You probably won’t even need the FOIL method. GRE Quant permits—and often rewards—problem solving methods that buck the conventions taught in high school math classes. To see what I mean, try these two algebra problems […]
3 Key Facts about e-Rater and Automated GRE Essay Scores
Every year more than a million GRE essays cross the desks of ETS essay raters. These same submissions slide through the subroutines of e-rater, an automated scoring program developed by ETS. With a scoring speed of 800 essays per second, e-rater could evaluate every GRE essay from 2013–2014 (about 1.1 million submissions) in under 25 […]