Even if you know all the concepts, rules, and formulas necessary for performing well in GRE Quant, it’s still possible to hit a score ceiling that you can’t seem to break. Such a situation might occur if you favor certain approaches that aren’t as practical as others when answering GRE questions.

For example, some students insist on testing values when solving most Quantitative Comparison questions, even when simplification or substitution will more efficiently lead to the right answer. While testing values has its merits in certain circumstances, it is not a one-size-fits-all strategy that can be applied in all circumstances.

Meanwhile, many students seek to “game” GRE Quant by using strategies such as backsolving and testing answers when using algebra would make more sense. Sure, backsolving may work here and there, but you’re better off using a strategy that will work for a wide range of questions, not just for a select few. After all, if the strategies you employ work less than 50 percent of the time, do you think you’ll be able to improve your GRE score?

Breaking out of your comfort zone can be challenging if you’ve become accustomed to using inefficient techniques. Still, if improving your score is important, you must take the time to “retrain your brain” so that more efficient ways of solving GRE problems become second nature to you. It’s important to remember that most GRE Quant questions can be solved using various approaches, but there is usually one approach that is much faster than the others. So, when answering practice questions, seek to identify at least two different ways to solve each question. You can even test each approach to see which one is most efficient.


Similarly, in GRE Verbal, there are more and less efficient ways of answering questions. To finish the Verbal section on time and maximize your Verbal score, you need to learn to use approaches that are both efficient and effective.

For instance, in answering Text Completion questions, you’ll be much more efficient if you use an organized step-by-step strategy of reading the entire sentence, identifying key markers and context clues, and then systematically going through the answer choices than you will be if you just plug choices into the blanks to see what works.

In Reading Comprehension also, there are efficient, effective strategies that can be used for answering each type of question. Of course, if you take the time to learn to use such strategies, you’ll achieve much greater speed and accuracy than you’d achieve by either using haphazard approaches to answer the questions or using gimmicky methods that don’t work reliably.

In general, it may be that a key aspect of improving your GRE Verbal score is to improve the efficiency with which you answer questions. For each type of Verbal question, you can ask yourself whether you actually have a clear strategy for answering questions of that type, whether your approach to answering them is efficient, and what you could do to answer them more efficiently.

In other words, when you see a GRE Verbal question, you should know how to proceed in order to answer it. So, if you discover that, for a type of Verbal question, you don’t have at the ready an approach that’s both efficient and reliably effective, then you’ve found an opportunity to improve your GRE Verbal score.

Happy Studying! ⭐