Completing GRE practice questions is a major part of preparing for the GRE exam. However, many GRE students are unaware of how to use practice GRE questions to make their learning more effective and efficient. In fact, often the way that people studying for the GRE use practice questions actually slows down their progress and ends up adding to their total study time.

In this article, I’ll share my top 7 tips for incorporating GRE practice problems into your test prep, tips that will not only save you time and frustration but also help you achieve the content mastery you need to earn an impressive GRE score on test day.

Let’s start with a foundational principle of incorporating practice into your GRE prep: you cannot rely on practice questions to teach you GRE content.


When you take an initial, free GRE practice test to get your baseline score (a must for anyone starting to prepare for the GRE), unless you find that you’re only a few points from your score goals for the GRE Quantitative and Verbal sections, it’s imperative that you don’t rely on quizzes, random practice sets, and practice tests to get you to the finish line. GRE practice is a way to refine your skills, not develop them from scratch.

There are a few problems associated with trying to learn the content and concepts you need to earn a good GRE score by simply completing hundreds of random practice questions. First, there are hundreds of different concepts that could show up on a GRE exam. So, if you think you’ll be able to “catch” them all by just doing random practice — even with a large number of questions — you’re taking a huge risk that is extremely unlikely to pay off.

Furthermore, you’re likely to be left with numerous gaps in your GRE knowledge, gaps that will be especially difficult to detect if you’re just doing a mix of random GRE practice problems to try to “cover your bases.” Trust me, this strategy is the opposite of covering your bases! In reality, this reliance on random practice is like rolling the dice on what your GRE score will be on test day.

OK, so you say to yourself, I’ll be more organized in my GRE practice, I’ll get a list of GRE topics and make sure I do practice in all of them, I’ll be methodical about which types of practice questions I start with and when I practice “the hard stuff.” Here’s the thing: GRE practice questions still won’t teach you the GRE. They simply allow you to learn how to apply the knowledge you’ve gained through dedicated study.

So, as systematic as you tell yourself you’re going to be in using GRE practice questions as your primary study tool, you’re unlikely to learn the vast array of concepts and strategies you need to earn a high GRE score by simply completing practice questions, and then reading the solutions to the questions you answered incorrectly. This is a popular but ineffective GRE prep strategy. For example, a student answers a couple dozen random practice GRE questions with a timer going, gets many of them incorrect, and then reads the answer explanations for the missed questions to find out how to answer the questions correctly. I know students who answered literally hundreds of questions using this “study plan” and didn’t see their GRE scores budge an inch.

The truth of the matter is that reading a solution that tells you what you did wrong and what you could’ve done right is not the same as actually knowing those things, and then putting them into practice. Furthermore, when your method of learning is doing GRE practice questions, you’re probably not going to immediately apply what you just learned from an answer explanation. Instead, you’re going to say, “OK, now I’ve learned that,” and move on to the next practice set. And by the time you see another question to which the information applies, there is a good chance that you won’t remember to use that information.

Don’t make the mistake of relying on solutions to practice questions to be your GRE teacher. If you do, you may find it very difficult to increase your GRE score in any notable way.


This may seem self-evident, given that GRE practice questions won’t teach you GRE content, but it’s important enough to spell out: only after you’ve learned the concepts associated with a GRE topic should you start doing practice GRE questions on that topic.

This order of events is important for a number of reasons. First, you will have the tools you need to actually answer practice questions correctly, so you won’t waste time trying to answer questions testing concepts that you simply don’t yet have an understanding of. Would you want to sit for a pop quiz on Stalin’s rise to power if you hadn’t read that chapter in your history textbook? Answering GRE practice questions on topics you haven’t studied isn’t much different.

Another reason to learn the content before you attempt to practice answering questions on it is that your practice will help solidify the knowledge and skills you just gained in studying the topic, so that everything you learn really “sticks.” In other words, learning a topic before you practice answering questions on it makes both your learning and your practice more effective.

Lastly — and this point is especially important — if you learn first, then practice, your practice will give you a far more accurate picture of whether you really learned the material you just studied and are ready to move on to another topic, or whether you need to continue studying the current topic in order to master the material. Targeting your strengths and weaknesses goes from being a game of whack-a-mole to a manageable task.

So, for best results, first build a strong foundation of knowledge in both the concepts and techniques related to a GRE topic, and then answer practice GRE questions on that topic. For example, before answering 1-blank Text Completion questions, you would learn how to recognize structural keywords and interpret punctuation (concepts), and you would also learn to eliminate answer choices from worst to best (technique).

Don’t try to guess what you already know or don’t know. Study a topic before you go down the rabbit hole of answering dozens of questions on it. You may find that you’re able to move through certain topics fairly quickly because you already do have a good foundation in them, but that doesn’t mean you’d be better off skipping straight to practice questions. You’d be surprised how many GRE students think they know a topic really well, only to find that when they start studying that topic for the GRE, they realize that they’ve forgotten a lot of what they knew about the topic or didn’t know as much as they thought.