👋 Hello, my friends at GRE Prep Club!

“Pre-thinking” is a common GRE Verbal strategy that involves coming up with possible answers before looking at the actual choices. On the surface, it sounds useful. If you can anticipate what the correct answers might be, you’ll breeze through the question faster, right? Not really.

Let’s start with the basics. In multi-blank Text Completion questions, the GRE is testing your ability to consider multiple parts of a sentence and understand how the different blanks relate to one another. Pre-thinking ignores that complexity. When you try to guess answers ahead of time, you are relying on what first comes to mind, which is often based on partial information or surface-level interpretation. That’s not how GRE questions are built.

In fact, the GRE often includes tempting trap choices that align with common “pre-thought” answers. If you’re looking at the options with a specific word already in mind, you’re more likely to latch onto something that matches your expectation rather than something that fits the full context. You may feel confident in your choice, but confidence built on flawed reasoning leads to wrong answers.

Another problem is that you might pre-think a word or idea that doesn’t even show up in the choices. At that point, you’ve wasted time and possibly boxed yourself in mentally. Instead of evaluating all the choices fairly, you may start dismissing good ones simply because they don’t match what you predicted.

Most importantly, pre-thinking can become a way to avoid doing the hard work of careful analysis. And careful analysis is exactly what the GRE rewards. To succeed on Verbal questions, you have to engage with the logic of each sentence and evaluate how each answer choice functions in that context. There are no shortcuts here.

So, if your goal is accuracy and efficiency, stop trying to outguess the test. Read carefully, process the full meaning, and evaluate all answer choices based on what is actually written, not what you expect to see.

Reach out to me with any questions about your GRE prep. Happy studying!

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep