What One Must Know Before Taking GRE

To score well in GRE one must know certain secrets of GRE exam. In GRE test the time management is the most important thing. Make sure you answer all the questions. The GRE test is a computer adaptive test (CAT) which means that computer adapts itself according to your performance. Therefore, if you answer a question correctly the next question on the screen is relatively more difficult and if you answered it incorrectly the next problem is probably an easier one. So if you see that the difficulty of the problem is increasing, you are doing well.

The first few questions in a GRE test is worth more point so you can spend comparatively more time on a first few questions. Try not to get first few questions incorrect otherwise it may have devastating impact on your score. To emphasize, answering wrong to the questions appearing first has more negative impact on your score than answering the questions appearing at the end. However, that does not mean that you should struggle with a question which appeared earlier in the exam. DON’T spend too much time on a question, move ahead. Answering a question wrong does not devastate your score. In GRE you can answer 2-3 questions wrong and still can score perfect that means even after getting 2-3 problems wrong you can score 800. However that depends on the difficulty level of the questions. In any case, spending too much time on a question is not advisable.

When you are approaching the end of the test, you may sometimes find that you don’t have sufficient time to answer the remaining questions. Don’t leave any question unanswered. A question unanswered has much more negative impact on the score than a question not done right. Since you cannot skip a question in a GRE test hence if you are running out of time just make educated guess and you should be fine. This is my personal experience, I didn’t practice much for the quant section because I thought it was too easy and hence in the test I was not able to manage my time properly in quantitative section. I realized at the end of the test that I had 8 questions to answer in less than 3 minutes. So I just started choosing the options blindly but completed all the problems by the time. I was in the mood of canceling my test because I thought I had messed up my quant but since I wrote the test already too late if I canceled the test I lost my year. SO finally I decided to see what my score was. And much to my surprise I had scored 760 in quantitative section. The central point of the discussion is, don’t lose your cool during the test and answer all the questions. You would be able to score well.

Got questions and comments? Feel free to write down your concerns.