The quantitative portion of the GRE strikes fear into many students’ hearts, especially since many students do not feel confident about their mathematics abilities. This anxiety can make you freeze up on the test or make silly mistakes because your brain is still preoccupied with fear.
Luckily, this anxiety over the unknown or unfamiliar can quickly and easily be addressed, and you should take heart in the fact that math skills are generally considered much more teachable than GRE verbal scores are. With practice, it’s not uncommon to see 5+ point increases.
Prepare for What You’ll See in the Math Section
ETS (the creators of the GRE and various other standardized tests) are explicit about what will and will not be covered on the quantitative section, which will give you a clear idea of the topics you must know and the types of problems you must be able to solve. They provide a math review guide (link) reviewing all the content covered on the quantitative section that you may find useful to consult if there is a specific topic you have never studied before or need to review.
Recognize the three types of problems
Learn the problem formats in order to avoid wasting time reading the instructions for each problem. There are three types of math questions you will encounter:
- Problem solving. These are five-option questions where one or more values is the correct answer to the problem. The prompt will tell you whether you are looking for one correct solution, or if more are possible (even if it says more are possible, there still might be only one correct answer).
- Numeric entry. These questions have a box for you to enter either an integer or decimal or a fraction (it will be clear in the answer box which form you are expected to give your answer in). There is no list of answer choices to choose from, and fractions do not need to be reduced.
- Quantitative comparisons. The question gives two values, descriptions, or equations and asks you to choose (always in this order) if A is larger, if B is larger, if they are equal, or if the answer cannot be determined from the information given (meaning that which one is larger depends on the value or characteristics of some aspect of one or both of the values).
Know the topics covered on the test
The General GRE tests math skills up to Algebra II, in addition to descriptive statistics.
All of the material (possibly with the exception of some of the statistics concepts if you did not take a statistics class in high school) is covered in normal high school math classes. Calculus, Trigonometry, and other more advanced math topics are not covered on the exam.
The four topics are:
- Arithmetic (including factorizing, roots, exponents, remainders, prime numbers, absolute values, rates, ratios, and percentages)
- Algebra (including exponents, factoring and simplifying, linear and quadratic equations, inequalities, solving simultaneous equations, setting up equations from word problems, and graphing equations, slopes, and intercepts)
- Geometry (including parallel and perpendicular line properties, triangle, quadrilateral, and other shape properties and angles, and volume, perimeter, and surface area calculations)
- Statistics (primarily descriptive statistics, probability, counting methods, and charts)
Knowing the topics means that if you see a problem that seems like it would take a non-covered topic like calculus to solve, you’re either doing the problem wrong or there is a simpler way to solve it.
Take a Baseline Test
You can use other study materials for practice problems, but nothing is going to give you problems as close to what you’ll experience on testing day as ETS’s own free software, PowerPrep II, which looks just like the actual GRE testing software and has two full-length practice tests.
Unless you know you need significant remedial practice and want to save both tests for when you are better prepared, take the first practice test all the way through. You can skip the verbal portions if you aren’t interested in being tested on them.
After the test is complete, you will see what your score would have been if this had been an official test. You will also be able to go back to see what the correct answers were for all of the problems.
Review your incorrect answers
The PowerPrep II software will show you correct answers, but it doesn’t provide explanations for them. A thorough free resource for explanations to the quantitative problems from this software is available here.
Figure out where you’re weakest
In other areas of your life, you probably want to play to your strengths. In studying for the GRE, you want to look for “easy wins”.
Look for patterns in what you got wrong. Are there any simple concepts you are missing consistently that you can spend an hour to learn? Are you struggling most with a specific type of problem?
Decide on your goal score
You may be wondering how important math GRE scores for psychology grad school applicants. The answer? Probably more important than you wish they were, if you’re reading this guide.
Some psychology programs and fields are very quantitative intensive, and some professors and programs will favor students who seem capable of quickly learning how to work on meta-analyses or higher-level statistical modeling with them. Rightly or wrongly, they may see your quantitative score as an indicator of how ready you are for graduate statistics.
Other programs may be less quantitatively intensive, yet their applicant pool is competitive enough that they are still able to eliminate scores below a certain threshold just to limit the number of applications they have to work through.
Scores are whole numbers ranging from 130 to 170. At a minimum, you should probably aim for the 70th percentile on the math section, and of course, the 80th or 90th percentile would be even better.
| Percentile | GRE-Q Score |
| 70th percentile | 158 |
| 80th percentile | 161 |
| 90th percentile | 165 |
Scoring higher than the 90th percentile (165) is certainly possible, but remember that you’re competing for correct scores on those final, very difficult problems with students who are applying to mathematics or other math-heavy graduate programs. No psychology program is going to expect you to be above the 90th percentile, and unless math comes naturally to you, your time would be better spent on other parts of your application package.
Solve Practice Problems
Now that you know where you stand, it’s time to practice. It won’t be fun, but you won’t raise your score by just reading about math formulas. Improving means doing many problems. Plan on doing at least a couple hundred math problems (and reviewing the correct answers) before test day.
When doing practice problems, it is better only to do a few problems at a time over a long period of time, rather than spending the last couple days before the exam cramming (this is called massed practice, and it is almost always less effective than distributed practice, which is only doing a few problems at a time).
How to structure your practice schedule
First, decide on how many problems you want to complete by your test date. Two hundred is a good goal for most people, while those who need a big score increase should plan to do around 400. Remember that you’ll also need to review your incorrect answers. Blindly solving problems without getting feedback on which ones you got wrong and why won’t help your score.
If you plan for your GRE date at least a couple months ahead of time, you can do just 5 to 10 problems a day and be well-prepared on test day.
The math section on the official GRE has 20 math questions for each 35-minute block of time, which means you should allocate yourself 1 minute and 45 seconds for each problem.
If you do 10 problems a day, you should set a timer for 17 minutes and 30 seconds. Don’t time yourself per problem but for the whole time in order to gain an instinct for how long to spend on each problem. It is natural to spend a little more on certain problems and a little less on others.
Reviewing your answers for what you got wrong and understanding why you got them wrong shouldn’t take more than 45 minutes, meaning that this will be less than an hour daily commitment.
Match what you’ll see on test day
Research shows that performance is better when you closely match the conditions under which you’ve practiced. You can’t control your testing environment, which means you must alter your practice environment to match it as closely as possible.
- Practice with a computer screen if possible
- Sitting upright at a desk
- Using unlined scratch paper
- Timed
- Earplugs or noise-canceling headphones, if desired (you can bring earplugs into the exam room, and the testing center will offer you headphones if you want them).
Review Your Answers
GRE practice books will generally have brief explanations on how to solve the problems and the correct answers at the back of the book, while online GRE training courses like Magoosh, (which is what I used) have videos explaining how to solve each problem.
It is helpful if after you review the answers you put the problem back into rotation so that you can try to solve it again in a couple of weeks to make sure that you’ve actually mastered the problem.
Problem Solving Strategies
There aren’t many tricks on the GRE, apart from knowing standard formulas and how to examine problems critically. However, there are a few general tips that can help.
Find an upper or lower limit on problems
Sometimes you can eliminate several answer choices by figuring out what the upper or lower limit on a potential answer could be.
For instance, a question about when two moving objects would collide if one is moving faster than another would have to be greater than the halfway point (meaning that the faster object would get to that point faster than the halfway point), which means you could eliminate any distance that is shorter than halfway. Spend a few seconds on each problem thinking about whether there are any answer choices you can reasonably eliminate.
Review the most important concepts
Is it any surprise that the best guide to the math concepts tested on the GRE is through the ETS itself? It provides a very good overview of every major content area and is worth looking through to make sure there are no important concepts or formulas that you’ve forgotten or never learned. The guide is free on the ETS website.
Don’t rewrite problems
When you’re reading from a computer screen but working by hand, it’s really tempting to copy everything down onto your scratch sheet. Get used to working the first step of the easier problems mentally, and not writing down anything until you’re at the second step. Minimizing what you write down will save you at least 10-20 seconds per problem.
Don’t rely on the calculator
Every problem on the math portion of the GRE can be reasonably solved without a calculator. Yes, every one. You probably won’t reach the point where skipping the calculator is always faster, but you can definitely save a few seconds on certain problems.
Learn when to guess and move on
Another benefit of timed practice is that you will develop a sense for when you’ve been working on a problem too long and should cut your losses and move on. There is no penalty for guessing on the GRE, so pick an answer and flag it in the software to come back to at the end if you have time.
Final Preparations for Test Day
You may never truly feel ready, but when you’ve prepared with adequate time, you will be as prepared as you’ll ever be. To perform as well as possible on test day:
- Make sure you know where your testing location is. A lot of testing centers are located in inexpensive strip centers and in other cheap, out-of-the-way real estate. Drive by the location or locate its precise location on Google Maps so you don’t get lost or panic when you try to find it on test day.
- Get a full night’s sleep. It may sound obvious, but there are few things you can do that will help your brain as much as not being sleep deprived. If your options are to spend a couple of hours working last minute problems or getting a couple hours more of sleep, choose sleep.
- Arrive to the testing center early. Waiting until the last minute to leave home will just distract you as you try to do some last minute studying, so do it at the testing center. If it isn’t full, they may let you in earlier than your exact time if you want to go ahead and begin, but you don’t have to start until your testing time. There will likely be limited seating in the office for you to review any notes or formulas one last time, or you can wait in your car to study until it’s time.
- Don’t let the writing section drain you mentally. The two Analytical Writing sections always come first on the GRE. For most psychology graduate programs, they are less important than your verbal and quantitative scores, so don’t let these sections stress you. Write clearly and with strong examples supporting your points, and then when this section is over, move on mentally so you aren’t dwelling on what you wrote while you’re working the verbal and math problems.
When you’ve finished the exam, your scores will pop up after about 30 seconds. If you hate them, you can retake the test after 21 days. I would draw the “retake” line somewhere around the 70 to 80th percentile generally, but make your decision based on how much you reasonably think you can improve your score. Around the 80th percentile or higher, your time is probably better spent working on other parts of your application, unless you’re both applying to extremely competitive programs and think you can reach the 90th percentile or higher.
If you did well but not great, remember that GRE scores are important but definitely aren’t everything. At most programs they are one of many indicators, and your scores alone usually won’t doom your application.
Good luck!
