From time to time, I will work with a student who knows the material tested on the GRE well yet continues to answer questions incorrectly. An analysis of the errors often reveals that he either made a silly mistake or put himself through a quagmire of tortured calculations that led to an incorrect answer.

In my eyes, careless errors are the worst mistakes a student can make for two big reasons: First, it’s a shame not to get credit for a GRE question that you know how to solve and should answer correctly. Second, careless mistakes are usually avoidable. They can be drastically reduced or even eliminated with focus, proper strategy, and practice.

Careless errors are the worst mistakes a student can make.

In general, humans probably are becoming more careless at a time when accuracy is of greatest importance. This increasing slackening is happening for a number of reasons. The good news is that each reason comes with a solid solution.

In this article, I’ll review common reasons for committing mindless mistakes on the GRE and the steps you can take to avoid them.




Strong reading skills will help you significantly on all sections of the GRE — yes, including the Quantitative sections. Strive to read everything carefully and methodically. Focus when you read. Make sure that you understand the main point of each sentence and the key concepts in each problem. It’s not unusual to need to reread math and verbal questions. If you don’t fully understand what you just read, read it again. While rereading may seem to take up valuable GRE time, it makes more sense than not understanding and getting all of the related questions wrong.

If you don’t fully understand what you just read, read it again.
Visualization can help you to read more carefully. When you read, imagine that what you are reading is unfolding as if you were watching a movie. Picture what you read. This visualization process will help your brain better assimilate and connect the information.




It’s easy to make reckless mistakes when your own writing is illegible. For example, if your numeral 2 has a funny habit of morphing into the letter Z, you’re likely to make mistakes. As someone with shockingly poor handwriting, I’ve found that writing in capital letters makes me less prone to misreading my own handwriting. You may like this penmanship strategy as well.

In addition to writing neatly, it’s important to organize your work thoughtfully. Get in the habit of using well-defined regions of the scratch paper for each problem. Don’t spread your work across the page haphazardly.

In regard to scratch paper: At your GRE testing site, test administrators will provide you with an initial supply of scratch paper. During the test, make efficient use of each sheet. You can obtain additional scratch paper, but you will waste valuable test time while you’re getting the re-supply.




I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen students elegantly power through a tough math problem, only to make a multiplication or division error. Don’t be this person. Each day, solve one or two ugly multiplication and division problems by hand. Don’t think that the online GRE calculator absolves you of the need to do routine arithmetic; it is unwieldy and time-consuming to use. You are also just as likely to make a mistake punching in numbers as you are writing them out longhand. But if you practice longhand frequently, you become more familiar with relationships among numbers and what reasonable answers look like. Therefore, you are more likely to catch your own mistakes than you would be if you just mindlessly entered calculations into a calculator and didn’t have to think about what you were doing. Save the calculator for difficult calculations that you can’t do with pen and paper.




Many GRE quant problems contain unit conversions. For example, a rate may be presented in miles per hour, but the answers are given in miles per minute. Look out for unit conversions in GRE quant problems. It’s easy to choose an incorrect answer with incorrect units, simply because the number looks correct.




Some problems read, for example, “n is divisible by all of the following, except…” Pay close attention to the specific language given in the problem. It stinks to do all the work properly, only to forget that the question was asking for “all of the following, except…”