A common cause of GRE score plateaus is ineffective practice.

One reason your GRE practice may not be sufficiently effective is that you may not be practicing enough. It takes a lot of practice to master a GRE topic. So, doing only a handful of practice questions on each topic may result in your GRE math score not improving or your GRE Verbal score being stuck below your goal.

That said, a more common reason why GRE practice isn’t effective isn’t the number of practice questions you answer. It’s how you answer them. For example, it’s common for GRE students to answer all their practice questions timed. Then, after answering the questions, they go through explanations to learn how they should have answered the questions they missed. Such an approach may seem to make sense. However, the truth is that it’s not particularly effective.

If the reason your GRE score isn’t improving is that your practice isn’t effective enough, you can solve the problem by practicing as follows:

• Practice one topic at a time.
• Start practicing a topic by doing easy questions involving the topic untimed. Keep doing easy questions until you’re achieving high accuracy, such as at least 90 percent correct in each practice set.
• Then, do the same thing with medium-difficulty questions involving the same topic. Practice untimed until you’re achieving high accuracy, such as 80 percent or more correct.
• Take a similar approach with hard questions involving the topic, answering them untimed until you achieve around 70 percent accuracy.
• Once you’re consistently achieving high accuracy in easy, medium, and hard questions involving the topic untimed, work on answering them faster until you’re answering them at test pace.

Notice the emphasis on practicing untimed until you achieve high accuracy. By practicing untimed, you give yourself time to learn to apply concepts and execute. That approach works much better for improving your score than doing questions timed and missing many.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep