Maybe it’s nerves, maybe your pacing feels a little off, maybe you encounter a couple of really tough questions and the time starts to get away from you — for whatever reason, during your actual GRE, you find yourself relying heavily on in-test features of the test, such as the marking option or the Quant calculator, way more than you would during a practice GRE.

Both the onscreen calculator and the marking option (the option to flag a question to return to later) are useful tools that you should by all means strategicallyimplement during your GRE, but like many tools, their overuse can backfire. In the case of the marking option, pulling up the status screen, identifying which questions you’ve marked, and returning to them can chip away at your time if you do it too often. Your optimal strategy, if possible, is to answer questions in the order they are presented to you. In the case of the calculator, because it’s pretty tedious to use, you need to be sure that you’re not using it at times when you should be either doing the math out by hand or recalling a key math concept to help you more easily solve the problem.

If you’ve taken all 5 official GRE practice exams, by the time you sit for your actual GRE, you should be pretty quick (and sparing) with your use of the marking option and have a solid strategy in place for what types of questions you need the calculator to solve and what types of questions you don’t.

However, sometimes when test-takers hit some unexpected hurdles on test day, or the test isn’t going as smoothly as they’d hoped and the pressure is on, tools to make the test “easier” can seem like a ready solution.

Whatever the reason, if you felt the need to skip around within the test sections a lot more than you did on practice exams or use the calculator “just in case,” that could explain your score drop.

Happy studying! ✨

Warmest regards,
Scott