Holiday Break Is NOT a Study Plan
It's December 16. You told your friends, your boss and maybe your mom that this break is THE break. Eight hours a day of GRE work, every day, from the moment the office closes until New Year's. Then your cousin flies in. Then there's the party, the dinner, the second dinner, the trip to the airport at 6 a.m. I'll bet that by December 27 you've done fewer than ten total hours. I'll bet you feel guilty about it too.
Here's the blunt verdict: holiday break is NOT a study plan. It's a stretch of calendar. A plan is what you actually DO with that calendar, hour by hour, when real life shows up. And real life always shows up in December.
The good news is that this is fixable. You don't need eight hour days. You need a plan that still works on your worst day.
Why the eight hour promise fails
Think about what you're training for. The GRE General Test runs about 3 hours 45 minutes. You get an Issue essay and an Argument essay (30 minutes each), two Verbal sections of 20 questions in 30 minutes each, two Quant sections of 20 questions in 35 minutes each, and one unscored section. That unscored section is one ETS is testing out, and it looks just like the others, so you can't tell which one it is. You can see the full layout on ETS's sections and question types page.
That's an endurance event. You train for an endurance event the way a runner trains for a marathon: steady, repeated, focused sessions. Nobody gets ready for a marathon by running for eight hours on one Saturday and then sitting on the couch for a week. That's not training. That's an injury.
And the eight hour day is a trap even when you DO pull it off. By hour five you're reading the same question three times. You're doing math in your head. You're 'studying' without learning. Students study. GRE assassins TRAIN.
Stop reading for a second and do the math on your own break. Seriously. Try this one.
The mistakes I see every December
Promising huge days instead of fixed blocks. Big promises feel good on December 15 and fall apart on December 20.
INSTEAD: pick ONE fixed block, about 90 minutes, at the same time each day. Early morning is gold over the holidays, because the house is quiet and nobody has opened the wine yet. Same time every day turns it into a habit, not a negotiation.
Cramming practice tests because you 'finally have time.' A practice test is a measuring device. It tells you roughly where you are. It does NOT make you better. Five tests in two weeks just measures the same you five times.
INSTEAD: take one full, timed practice test per week at most. ETS offers free POWERPREP practice tests that use the real format. Take the whole thing, essays included, in one sitting. Then spend the next session reviewing it.
Only doing NEW questions. Plowing through hundreds of fresh problems feels productive. It isn't. Being an acquaintance of 2,000 questions is worth less than being the commander of 500.
INSTEAD: redo the questions you missed. It's not about the right answer or the wrong answer. It's about WHAT YOU'RE DOING to get there.
Studying on the couch with no paper. Holiday studying drifts into the living room, and suddenly you're doing algebra in your head with the TV on.
INSTEAD: sit at a table with scratch paper, every time. On test day you get scratch paper and an on screen calculator, so train with paper and a calculator now. If you're too 'smart' to take notes, that's pride talking, and pride is the most expensive habit on this test.
Letting a zero day turn into a zero week. You miss one day for the party. Then you think 'the week is shot anyway.'
INSTEAD: set a minimum day. Twenty minutes. Redo three missed questions. That's it. The minimum day keeps the chain alive.
A plan that survives the family dinners
Every day of your break falls into one of four types. Decide TODAY which type each day is. Write it on the calendar.
| Day type | What you do | About how long |
|---|---|---|
| Home day | One focused block of Quant or Verbal with notes on paper, then redo your missed questions | 2 hours |
| Family day | Minimum day: redo three to five missed questions | 20 to 30 minutes |
| Travel day | Minimum day, done before you leave | 20 minutes |
| Test day (once a week, at most) | One full, timed practice test, essays included, in one sitting | About 4 hours |
Notice what's missing. There's no eight hour day. A home day of 2 hours is plenty if those 2 hours are real work. Real work means you're training the skills that win points, like testing values instead of grinding the algebra.
Here's what that looks like on a real GRE question type. A Quantitative Comparison question gives you two quantities, A and B, and asks you which is bigger. The four answer choices are always the same.
