Vocabulary approach | Achievable GRE

The GRE doesn’t directly test your vocabulary, but to get a high score on the verbal reasoning section, you will need to know how to at least differentiate between some complicated vocabulary words.

This course includes over 250 vocabulary words that commonly appear on the GRE. Learning 250 words is actually quite a considerable amount, and you won’t be able to do it at all once. To make it more approachable, we’ve split these 250 words into 10 groups of 25 words each and spread them out between the other topics in this course.

Each vocabulary page lists the definitions of the words with some supplementary information like the part of speech and example sentences. Make sure to take the quiz at the end of each vocab page!

Sidenote

Vocabulary flashcards are NOT an effective way to study!

At some point, we’ve all studied with flashcards, and maybe you prefer studying that way. However, they’re just not an effective way to study. There are two main reasons flashcards aren’t very effective:

You’ll think you know the answer (but not really). It’s very easy to look at the card and say, “Yeah I know this,” but then when you flip it over your guess was kind of close but not exactly. And then you say to yourself, “Right, that’s what I meant” and move on. But you weren’t actually right, and now you’ve just reinforced that incorrect information! Answering an actual quiz puts you in a situation where it is clear whether you actually know it or need additional review.
It’s difficult to know what and when to review. You’ll build a flashcard deck, run through it, and then what? Do you have a spreadsheet tracking all your responses so you know where to focus? And even if you do, how do you know when to review each card? Best case, you’ll study too frequently, wasting time that could have been spent elsewhere. Worse case, you’ll wait too long to review and end up forgetting material, having to spend much more time relearning it.

Fortunately, Achievable GRE includes something much better than vocabulary flashcards: memory-tracked vocabulary quizzes.

Our vocabulary quizzes are like vocabulary flashcards, but much smarter. We individually track your personal mastery of every single word. Based on how you’re doing and some complex algorithms backed by years of research on the science of memory, we schedule them for review at the optimal time in the future. It’s very efficient, saving you tons of time, and very effective, ensuring that you’ll remember the information on exam day.

So just take the vocabulary quiz at the end of each chapter and then come back to your dashboard to review them when we suggest. Let our learning engine do the heavy lifting for you!