Your New Year's GRE Resolution Is a TERRIBLE Plan

It's January 14. Two weeks ago you told yourself (maybe out loud, maybe at midnight with a drink in your hand) that THIS is the year you finally crush the GRE. "I'm going to study more." Now be honest with me. Since January 1, how many actual GRE sessions have you done? Not "flipped through a book." Not "watched a video on the train." Real sessions, with a pencil, a timer and a clear idea of what you were working on.

I'll bet the number is SMALLER than you'd like. That's not because you're lazy. It's because "study more" was never a plan. It was a wish.

So here's the blunt version: your New Year's GRE resolution is a TERRIBLE plan. The good news is that it's completely fixable, and you can swap it for a real plan before January ends. It'll take you about ten minutes tonight.

Why "study more" falls apart by mid January

"More" has no finish line. More than what? When? On what? A wish like that lives only in your head, and anything that lives only in your head gets bumped by work, by friends, by one bad day. Think about the gym memberships people buy every January. Paying for it feels like progress. Going is the progress.

The GRE doesn't care about your intentions. It's a standardized test, which means it's predictable, which means you can TRAIN for it. But training means specific sessions aimed at a specific event. So let's look at the event.

Know what you're training for

The GRE General Test (this version has been around since August 2011) runs about 3 hours and 45 minutes. Here's what's in it, according to ETS's breakdown of the sections and question types:

A few details matter for how you train. There's also one unscored section that looks just like the others. You won't know which one it is, so every section has to be treated as real. You get a 10 minute break after the third section. The test is adaptive section by section, which means how you do on your first Quant section decides how hard your second Quant section is, and the same goes for Verbal. Inside a section you can skip a question, mark it, and come back to change your answer. Quant comes with an on-screen calculator. Verbal and Quant are each scored from 130 to 170, and the writing is scored from 0 to 6.

Stop and look at that for a second. Close to four hours. Six chunks of work plus a break. Does "I'll do some flashcards when I have time" sound like training for THAT?

The resolution mistakes I see every January

1. No calendar, just a feeling. "I'll study this week" means you'll study when it's convenient, and it's never convenient. INSTEAD: Put sessions on your calendar like meetings with your boss. Day, start time, length and ONE topic. "Tuesday, 7:00 to 8:30 pm, Quant: number properties" is a plan. "Study GRE" is not.
2. No test date. Without a date, every week feels optional. INSTEAD: Look at the test dates on the ETS site and pick one that gives you enough runway for your goal score and your application deadlines. A real date turns "someday" into a countdown.
3. Using practice tests as your workout. Some people resolve to take a practice test every weekend, or worse, every other day. A practice test is a measuring device. It tells you roughly where you stand and points at your 'weak spots.' It does NOT make you a better test taker. INSTEAD: Take one full, timed test, like ETS's free POWERPREP practice tests, to get a baseline. After that, one per week MAXIMUM. The real training happens in between.
4. Counting questions instead of learning from them. "I did 300 questions this month!" Great. How many of them could you redo right now, the fast way, with zero mistakes? What's more powerful: being an acquaintance of thousands of questions, or being the commander of a few hundred? INSTEAD: Every session ends with review. Rework every miss AND every lucky guess, write down WHY it went wrong, and redo it a week later.
5. Doing the work in your head. That's pride, and pride is expensive on this test. The silliest mistakes come from math you 'just knew.' INSTEAD: Notes on paper for every question, every session, so that by Test Day it's automatic.
6. Training short for a long event. Twenty minute sessions forever won't get you ready for nearly four hours. You don't train for a marathon by only running sprints. INSTEAD: Start with focused 60 to 90 minute sessions, then build in longer blocks (a Verbal section and a Quant section back to back, then more) so your brain knows what hour three feels like.

What a real training session looks like

A training session isn't "do questions until I'm bored." It's a topic, a timer, paper and review. Here's a taste. This is a Quantitative Comparison question, a GRE Quant format where you compare two quantities and pick one of four fixed answers.

Notice what that question actually trains. Not "a hard question." A HABIT. Read the rule, write it down, test values on paper, try a weird number before you pick. Work 15 questions like that and review every one, and you've trained. Work 60 while half watching TV, and you've just stayed busy.

And this is the real reason the resolution fails. "Study more" measures effort. Training measures what you can now do that you couldn't do last week. Only one of those raises your score. The GRE will give you the score that you EARN, and you earn it one specific session at a time.

Your challenge for tonight

Open your calendar. Right now, not tomorrow. Between today and January 31, block out at least six sessions. Each one gets a day, a start time, a length and ONE topic. Make one of them a full, timed practice test so you have a baseline. Then do your first session this week, on paper, and write down every mistake and WHY it happened.

If you can't find six sessions in the next two and a half weeks, that's not a scheduling problem. That's a decision about what you want MORE: a higher GRE score or your evenings exactly as they are. Either answer is allowed. Just make it on purpose.