A common cause of GRE score plateaus is unsophisticated strategies. The use of unsophisticated strategies can be particularly problematic in GRE Verbal though can also hold down your Quant score.

The issue is that simplistic strategies can help you get easy questions correct but won’t work for answering harder questions. So, when you use simple, unsophisticated strategies, you can score only so high. You generally get easier questions correct, but your performance on harder questions is hit or miss.

For example, on the Verbal section, we can get many easy Text Completion questions correct by simply paying attention to keywords. However, the same approach won’t work for harder Text Completion questions. To get those correct and achieve a high Verbal score, you need to use a more sophisticated approach.

In general, if you find that you typically get easy questions correct but aren’t sure how to answer hard questions, then to get your GRE score to increase, you probably have to use more sophisticated approaches.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep