Over the years, I’ve noticed that the students who went on to earn the highest GRE Quant scores were the ones who never gave up on problems during practice. Conversely, the students who gave into their discomfort after 60 seconds or 1:30 were the ones who, all else equal, saw the least improvement in their GRE Quant scores.

Even when your brain begins to hurt and you feel frustrated and tired, or you’d rather be doing anything other than studying for the GRE, you must train yourself to push through quant questions. You must learn to be okay with – and even embrace – the feeling of being uncomfortable. Consider hardship a tool for growth, and put that tool to work.

Learning perseverance is another reason to work on practice questions untimed until your skills improve. There is a psychological component to getting the correct answer to a GRE Quant question. You may look at a question and not know how to answer it at first. You may start wondering whether you have what it takes to get the answer. Generally, if you keep at it and go through the fire — the questioning yourself, the fear, the anger, the boredom, the fatigue — you will arrive at the answer, but that process may take much longer than two or three minutes. So, if you give yourself only those couple of minutes, you let yourself off the hook. You don’t learn to go through the fire and come out the other side with the answer. You can go to the explanation and learn what the answer is, but you will not have learned one of the most important things: how to persist, and hack, and do whatever you have to do to get the answers to challenging questions. Don’t underestimate the value of this skill on the GRE.

Of course, it is always better to know how to answer a question elegantly and efficiently. However, even if you don’t know exactly how to solve a question, I want you to hack, calculate, cogitate, count on your fingers, or do whatever you have to do to get a correct answer. Stay with the problem and don’t give up unless you are truly, absolutely stuck. Research indicates that when you think you’ve done all that you can, you’ve actually done about forty percent of what you’re capable of. And even if you don’t answer the question correctly, you will be teaching yourself how to be resilient and push on in the face of adversity.

Keep in mind also that when it comes to GRE questions, often “the bigger the bark, the smaller the bite.” In other words, the nastier a GRE Quant problem may look upon first glance, the easier it is to correctly answer. So, do your best not to become intimidated when first reading a question.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep