GRE students sometimes make the mistake of thinking that learning the material and completing a ton of GRE Verbal Reasoning practice questions is enough to ace the GRE Verbal sections. What they don’t realize is that one-third of the puzzle that is their GRE preparation is missing.

If you are not analyzing every question you answer incorrectly to figure out where you went wrong, you are not getting the full benefit of your GRE Verbal practice. This is true when doing either practice sets or practice tests. You must return to the questions you got wrong, pinpoint the specific mistake you made, and either do the necessary content review or behavior correction to ensure that you don’t make that same mistake in the future.

If you don’t perform this necessary work, you’re likely to commit the same errors over and over again, or you may overlook gaps in your knowledge and skills that will come back to bite you on test day.

So, don’t just note how many questions you got wrong in a practice set or on a practice test, or what types of GRE Verbal questions you got wrong. Revisit each missed question and try to identify whatever errors you made. Did you misread the passage? Were you rushing and reading too quickly? Did you make a careless mistake or forget the definition of a word? Did you misidentify the conclusion or assumption in a passage? Did you gloss over an important detail in a sentence? The more precise you can be when analyzing your mistakes, the better you’ll be able to find your exact weaknesses and strengthen them.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep