One of the biggest mistakes GRE students make is immediately jumping into trying to solve practice questions with a timer going. If you are going to master GRE Verbal, you have to give yourself the time to perform the type of deep analysis of questions that I mentioned earlier. In other words, you need to learn how to answer GRE Verbal questions before you can learn how to answer them quickly.

With that in mind, it’s essential that when you start solving GRE Verbal practice questions, you do so untimed. In fact, I recommend to my students that, in the beginning of their GRE Verbal preparation, they don’t worry about the clock at all and instead focus solely on analyzing questions and finding right answers. This is painstaking but essential work, without which you’re unlikely to gain the skills you need to answer GRE Verbal questions both quickly and correctly.

Think of it this way: If you get a job in a field in which you are inexperienced, you probably won’t perform your duties as quickly as your more experienced colleagues will. However, rushing through the job simply to get it done wouldn’t make sense. Moreover, as you gained experience and mastered the skills you needed to do the job, you would naturally do tasks that used to take you a long time more quickly.

The same concept applies to mastering GRE Verbal. You have to learn to see exactly what is going on in Verbal passages and answer choices, and you probably won’t learn to do so by spending a few minutes on each question. You may find that in the earlier stages of your Verbal training, you need to spend up to 15 minutes on a single question, learning to see all of the things you need to see to find a correct answer. Don’t be discouraged by the amount of time you need to answer Verbal questions when you’re just starting out. You are doing exactly what is necessary to drive up your score, and with every question, you’re strengthening your skills.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep