Then review your results, figure out what types of questions you’re still getting wrong, and get back to practicing your weak areas.
#How to take gre powerprep test simulator#
But then every week or two, you should block out a few hours to test yourself with a full-length GRE simulator exam. You need to spend ample time learning content and working practice problems before each practice test. Thinking about that spectrum on the GRE, then, there’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. Don’t make the mistake of blurring that line. Practice is practice and tests are tests. I sometimes have students buy a 5-pack of our GRE Simulator Exams and take all of them within a week or two! It’s like they’re using the practice tests as a source of practice problems rather than as a test of their current abilities, which is what the practice exams are really for. On the other end of the spectrum are students who only take practice tests. It’s not the kind of thing you want to leave until the end. Even if you haven’t reviewed all of the content and question types tested on the GRE yet, you still want to take periodic practice tests throughout your preparation so that you can get benchmark readings of your progress and practice applying the concepts and strategies you have learned so far. I hear it often from my students: “But I haven’t learned everything yet, and I don’t feel ready to take a practice test.” That’s an error in thinking. If you think about it as a continuum, on one end of the spectrum would be people who delay taking their first practice test for weeks or even months, thinking they’re “not ready” to take a test yet. The same balancing act applies to your GRE prep. They still get better from the game experience, but most of their improvement comes from practice. More often they only play a game every couple weeks. Sometimes they may play two games in the same week, but almost never more than that. They need ample time to practice, but then they need to occasionally test themselves with games. There’s a sweet spot for a soccer team, then, between practice and games. So over-emphasizing games isn’t the right answer, either. On the flip side, imagine that same soccer team playing three or four games every week! That seems like overkill, doesn’t it? I mean, they’d never get significantly better just playing games because they’d never be able to work on the mistakes they were making in those games or work on new plays and strategies - not to mention the mental and physical fatigue they would experience. That’s what games are for, to show us where we stand and enable us to apply what we’ve been practicing in a real-time environment. What if all they ever did was practice but never played any games? They could spend weeks on end practicing the fundamentals, working on their conditioning, watching film, and scrimmaging against themselves, but they’d never know how much they were improving (if at all) if they never tested themselves against a live opponent. What Sports Teams Can Teach Us About GRE PracticeĬonsider an elite soccer team. Let’s use a sports analogy to shed some light on these important questions. How many of them should you take, though? And how often?
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Taking full-length GRE practice tests is an indispensable part of preparing for the GRE.