Pinpoint your specific weaknesses, so that you can identify the root causes of your incorrect answers.

Identifying gaps in knowledge or skills can be somewhat tricky, especially if you’re missing questions that involve applying multiple concepts in one problem. You have to break down the question into its component steps to identify your weak area. For example, a rate-time-distance question may require you to do all of the following:

• Interpret the given information
• Recall and apply one or more formulas
• Create an equation
• Solve a system of equations involving fractions

So, let’s say you encounter an average rate question. What would happen if you knew the formula but made a mistake in dividing fractions as you calculated the average rate (step 4)? You would not correctly answer the question! Perhaps this is a sign that you have issues working with fractions, which is a common problem among GRE students who haven’t done much math since high school. Difficulties with fractions can negatively impact your ability to answer many GRE quant questions, and working with fractions is just one skill.

Now, perhaps you’ve noticed that you frequently miss rate-time-distance questions or can solve only the easiest of such questions when doing mixed problem sets or taking practice tests. However, what you haven’t realized is that you don’t simply “have trouble with rate-time-distance questions.” The real issue is that you’re not well-versed in handling calculations involving fractions.

If you were to shore up that skill, rate-time-distance questions would become one of your strongest areas in Quant. The trick is to pinpoint this specific weakness, so you can address the root cause of your missing certain question types.

Pinpointing weaknesses is essential in the Verbal arena as well. For example, you might encounter a particular Sentence Equivalence question and recall that you must find two answer choices that are similar in meaning (a synonym pair). You identify two synonym pairs among the answer choices, and you find that when either pair is used, the two sentences created convey the same meaning.

You answer the question with what you feel is the best answer, and then you later discover that your answer was incorrect. You double-check the meanings of all the words and verify that your vocabulary knowledge was spot-on. So, what happened?

Well, when you carefully reread the question in its entirety, you realize that you overlooked the contrast word “despite,” which clarifies that the two synonym words you chose made no sense and the other synonym pair was correct. The takeaway here is that, even though you missed a vocabulary question, it was not the word meanings but a context clue that tripped you up. After pinpointing this weakness, you can spend additional time reviewing the real reason for your incorrect answer: contrast/agreement words.