1. The first ten questions are the most important and determine your score.
Absolutely not. The large test prep companies have for years claimed that it is very important to get as many of the first ten questions right as possible, because those first ten questions somehow are weighted more or worth more. This is completely and totally untrue. You should of course try to get as many of the first ten questions right, but not at the expense of the rest of the test. In fact, if you run out of time (because you spent so much time on the first ten questions) and you leave the last 5 questions blank, your score goes down by a noticeable amount. Instead of trying to spend more time in the beginning of the test, you should try to have a steady pace of about two minutes per question (on the math...on the verbal you have slightly less time per question).
Therefore, it is very important to treat the first ten questions as you would treat all the other questions. Try to do them in under two minutes. If you recognize that question number 7 is so damn hard that you perhaps maybe might get the answer after 5 minutes of hard work, don't do it just because it's question number 7. Make an educated guess, and now you have a little bit of extra time for the next tough question.
2. To do well, you need to know how to do complex math.
Permutation and combination questions, as well as probability questions and standard deviation questions, are fairly rare on the test. Out of the 420 math questions in the official guides, 124, or almost a third, are geometry questions, and the next most popular type of question is algebra. It would therefore behoove you to really master algebra and geometry, (especially triangles), and to know how to do in under two minutes the questions that test the standard pre-algebra, not the esoteric stuff.
Knowing how to quickly reduce fractions is much more important than almost anything else on the test. Similarly, you are much better off memorizing the 12 x 12 times table, the first 15 squares, and the common right trianges, then you are learning how to do complicated combinatorics.
3. You need to do every question.
Just because you need to answer every question doesn't mean that you have to do every question.
To prove this theory, one of our tutors perfromed an experiment using the ETS diagnostic test software (provided by ETS and exactly like the actual test).
First, he skipped every 5th question on a math section, meaning he randomly picked A on 6 questions (including the last question). He wound up with an 800.
Then, he skipped every 4th question, meaning once again he randomly picked A on 7 questions. He wound up with a 740.
Finally, he skipped every THIRD question. He wound up with a 760 (he got slightly luckier on the guessing than the previous time). What this tells us is that you can comfortably decide not to do a third of the math section and still get way above 700.
Managing your time well is essential to getting a decent score, and the cornerstone of efficient time management on the GRE is knowing what questions to avoid. Why should you avoid some questions? Remember, if you run out of time and don't answer the last 5 questions, your score will go way down. The worst thing that can happen to you on the test is to get bogged down on two or three questions early on, spend 4 or 5 minutes and still be no closer to the answer, and then race against the clock for the rest of the test, finally guessing randomly on the last ten questions. Not only did you probably bomb the last quarter of the test, but you most likely missed a lot of questions that you could have gotten because you had to rush through them.
Instead, you should skip those couple of questions that would otherwise eat up your time. By doing so, you're essentially deciding which questions you will get wrong, and leaving yourself more time for other difficult questions that you CAN solve.
The strategy for guessing boils down to this: if a question is going to take you 4 or 5 minutes to do, don't do it. Take up to 30 seconds to make an educated guess, but no more than that, and then move on. That way, you have more time for the next difficult question. So, effective time management requires two things: the ability to recognize which questions are ones that will take you a long time to solve, if you can solve them at all, and the discipline to skip those questions. It's imperative that you start building that discipline as soon as you start studying.
4. If the questions start getting easier that means that you've bombed the test.
Another dangerous myth. Forget about trying to figure out how you're doing, and instead maintain your focus so that you can answer the questions correctly. If you get an easy question in the middle of the test, it might be that you just got an experimental question, and not that you messed up the previous question. Or perhaps you got a question that for most people is difficult but for some reason is not so difficult for you. Instead of fretting over it, concentrate on finishing the test and solving each remaining question as accurately as possible.
