One of the strategies we recommend to our GRE students who are seeking to improve their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills is reading high-level writing that you can find in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Economist, and similar publications. Doing this as part of your prep for the complicated passages and vocabulary you will encounter on the GRE will increase your comfort and confidence with approaching challenging material. Immersion in all things GRE and GRE-esque over the course of your preparation will yield the greatest rewards in terms of score increase. To that end, we are happy to share an essay that can serve as a leisurely read as well as a way to build your vocabulary and practice your GRE Reading Comp skills.

The Sidney Awards, named

In response to the calculator guide posted by the test-maker, I wrote this entry and this one to help you understand how to use — and, more importantly, not to use — the GRE on-screen calculator. In this capstone to the epic calculator trilogy, I’d like to highlight some of the advanced features covered in the calculator guide to help you make the most of the on-screen calculator when you do decide to use it.

1. Order of operations. Due to its lack of functions, the GRE on-screen calculator looks a lot like a simple four-function calculator. This appearance is deceptive in one major respect, however: four-function calculators don’t obey the order of operations, but the GRE on-screen calculator does. To compute (4 + 6) / 5 in, for example, the Windows calculator, you could simply type:

4 + 6 / 5 =

And you’d get

I started my Kaplan career teaching the GRE in the Puerto Rico center, where most of my students knew English as a Second Language. The GRE can be especially daunting when not the math, nor the vocabulary, but the English itself intimidates you! Never fear – if you are in this position I’ve got some action steps to help you out.

1. Total English immersion between now and test day
Start this right now. Immersion means only English movies, English music, English radio, English-speaking friends, and English newspapers. You can absorb grammar and get a better ear for the language even in the short time between now and test day if you immerse yourself. Free resources abound on the internet: nytimes.com for reading, npr.org for radio (Fresh Air, Diane Rehm, and This American Life are

It can be easy to think of the Quantitative section of the GRE as nothing more than an arbitrary test of abstract knowledge.  You may have even said to yourself at some point, “I’m going to grad school to study [insert field in Humanities] – why do I need to show proficiency in Math?”  Well, there are actually a few good answers to that question.  For one thing, you may realize once you’re in grad school that a statistics or other math-based class is a requirement for your degree.  For another thing, test-makers aren’t evaluating your knowledge of “math” so much as they are testing your ability to critically think through problems that have, at their roots, the same foundational rules.  The thinking goes something like this: if you know the basic rules of high school math

When you see GRE questions that require you to parse logic, SLOW DOWN. Skip them or take a guess, and come back if you are short on time. You should approach them in the same way that Hansel and Gretel approached being abandoned in the woods: bring your best shiny stones and leave lots of markers for yourself so you can find your way. Take a look at an example:

This problem has a lot going on. First, there is the language that indicates you are about to enter some spooky woodlands, namely the “must be true.” This language crops up often when number properties are being tested (as well as inequalities). Since x is between 0 and 1, a savvy test taker will immediately know that she is about to be tested on number properties of fractions.

The

Take another short video study break and brush up on a difficult GRE question type and topic. Two minutes gets you a video lesson in Numeric Entry and Combinations/Permutations. In this video, Kaplan GRE expert Adi Hanash walks you through a GRE Numeric Entry question and helps you learn to calculate combinations from challenging GRE word problems. For GRE combination and permutation problems, focus on the individual outcomes you have for each option.

Remember, a little bit of study here and there adds up, so take a moment to shore up your GRE math knowledge today – and let us know what you think of the video!

In the first post of this series, I provided concrete scenarios in which you shouldn’t use a calculator. That’s all anyone ever seems to say about the GRE on-screen calculator: “Don’t use it!” Well, let’s try to be fair: when should you use the calculator? According to the test maker’s guide, you should use the calculator

[when there are] calculations that you know are tedious, such as long division, square roots[,] and addition, subtraction or multiplication of numbers that have several digits.

Unfortunately, this advice is only partially correct. Let’s take a look at where it’s accurate and where it isn’t:

1. Long division? You should only use the calculator for long division when the final answer needs to be a decimal. If the choices are fractions, then the calculator-generated decimal is unhelpful, since the GRE‘s calculator doesn’t have a decimal-to-fraction conversion button.

In general, I find that students’ fear of division is out of

The GRE tests your vocabulary in various ways. To correctly answer Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion questions, you have to know something about all of the words in the answer choices. Students often ask, “How can I increase my vocabulary before Test Day?”

The Kaplan answer to that is simple: Think like a thesaurus, not like a dictionary. Knowing detailed definitions for 100 words is not as useful as knowing approximate synonyms for 200-300. Kaplan offers an inexpensive app for learning vocabulary. Kaplan’s Verbal Workbook has a chapter devoted to vocabulary, and in it are several pages of word groups. For example, grouped under “Difficult to Understand” are 14 related words, including abstruse, cryptic, and enigmatic. If you learn this group you will recognize any of these words on Test Day.

There are different ways to practice learning word groups. I prefer a “reverse

Writing a blog entry presents a paradox of sorts…the writer must be laconic, else the reader would lose interest and become truculent; simultaneously, the writer must be bombastic (at least to a minute degree), lest the reader find the post banal or hackneyed.

As I compose this post, my aspiration is that it perambulates a line amidst the abstruse and the eloquent. I also hope that you will relish my levity and be compelled to ascertain the definition of at least the occasional word.

You may feel apathy towards the month of March, deeming it to have nothing to offer but the dreaded Ides, which makes us suspect conspiracy and annihilation. I, however, would have to earnestly repudiate your claim of apathy, for March is to be celebrated! The month contains a noteworthy holiday, with proliferating celebrants. What is that holiday, you inquire?

It is Pi Day! March 14, 3-14 to

ETS, the maker of the GRE, posted a guide to the on-screen calculator on their site. The guide itself is very good, but I’d like to give special attention to a few of its points in a series of posts. Correctly using — or, more importantly, not using — the GRE on-screen calculator on Test Day has a big impact on your performance.

My favorite bit from the test maker’s guide was this tantalizing suggestion:

Avoid using [the on-screen calculator] for simple computations that are quicker to do mentally, such as 10 – 490, (4)(70), 4,300/10, sqrt(25), and 30^2.

I call this advice “tantalizing” because it’s absolutely correct — but the author doesn’t specify why the example computations are considered “simple.” Some students may not know why, for example, (4)(70) should be computed mentally. Let me show you why all of the above computations are, indeed, simple:

10 – 490. This calculation