One of the most common reasons why people have trouble increasing their GRE Verbal scores is that they do all practice questions timed. In other words, when practicing, they give themselves the same amount of time per question that they’ll have when taking the GRE. Here’s why doing all your practice timed doesn’t work.

To master GRE Verbal, you need to learn to take a number of different steps to answer each question type. For example, to answer a Text Completion question, you need to read the entire sentence, identify words that signal contrast or agreement, find the known information, and more. Meanwhile, to become skilled in consistently answering questions correctly, you have to learn to execute these steps well, without making careless mistakes.

If you take all those steps at test pace when you’re just beginning to practice them, you’ll likely have difficulty learning to execute them well. You’ll likely rush through them, miss a high percentage of the questions you see, and struggle to improve. Many people preparing for the GRE have such an experience.

So, what’s the answer? The answer is to do much of your GRE Verbal practice untimed. By taking as much time as you need to fully understand each question and get it correct, you’ll learn to go through the motions that lead to success. Then, once you’re skilled in answering questions untimed and you’re getting a high percentage of them correct, you can work on speeding up to test pace while maintaining high accuracy.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep