You’ve now made it through all of the Achievable GRE material.
In this final section, we won’t cover any testable content. Instead, you’ll review how to register for the exam, what to expect on test day, and a few best practices to use as your test date approaches.
To register for the GRE, you’ll need to create an account on the ETS website. Once your account is set up, you can register for either an in-person or online exam.
You can also view available testing dates for both in-person and at-home test takers here. The test is offered year-round, but try not to schedule it too close to your application deadlines in case you decide to retake it.
A few key logistics to keep in mind:
Official scores are not available until 8 to 10 days after your test.
On test day, you can send your scores to four schools for free.
After those four schools, it costs $35 to send your scores to each additional school. You can read more about this policy here.
According to the most recent information, the test costs $220. There are exceptions for test takers in India and China, and for those eligible for the Fee Reduction Program.
There’s no single perfect answer, but your scores on Achievable practice exams are your best indicator. If you’ve been using the system as intended, you’ve likely completed hundreds (or even thousands) of practice questions in review. That work builds the knowledge you need for the exam.
The next step is showing that you can put everything together under realistic conditions by taking and reviewing multiple full practice exams. Our practice exams are designed to simulate the real test by covering a wide range of topics across all testable material.
When you take a practice exam:
Put your notes aside.
Don’t use outside resources (like the Achievable reading material or Google). Using resources during the exam will artificially inflate your score.
After every exam, do a thorough review of each question and answer. Make sure you understand why you got each question right or wrong.
Also, think beyond the question. A common pitfall is studying specific questions instead of the underlying content. While our questions are written to mimic the real exam, no one knows which questions they’ll see on test day. ETS closely guards its question bank, and its test writers create uniquely worded questions. If you’re memorizing answers without understanding the why, you’re likely to struggle when the wording or scenario changes.
A useful self-check is:
If I was given another question, with a completely different scenario and/or wording, am I confident I would know the answer?
If the answer is yes, keep moving forward. If the answer is no, go back to the reading materials and review the topic.
Our practice exams match the real GRE’s time constraints, question types, and overall structure. We use our hundreds of quant templates and hundreds of verbal questions to generate a randomized exam that feels like the actual GRE. The tips below will help you get an accurate diagnostic score and interpret it correctly.
When you’re taking practice exam sections, treat them like the real thing:
Make sure to minimize distractions. Silence your phone and let the people around you know you’ll be unavailable for a while.
Do not use an advanced calculator, since the ETS calculator is extremely basic. This online version closely matches the ETS calculator.
Stay within the time constraints so you experience the pressure and fatigue you’ll feel on test day. We won’t cut you off if you keep working, but practicing under time pressure is part of the preparation.
The Achievable system is designed to help you drill core techniques until they’re fast and reliable. That way, you can save time for questions that require more critical thinking. Here are a few ways to manage your time effectively:
When you are 95% sure of an answer, choose it, flag it for review later if you have doubts, and then move on. It’s tempting to spend extra time chasing the last 5% of confidence, but you need to keep moving steadily through all questions.
Always reread the question before you choose your answer. This helps prevent avoidable mistakes caused by skimming.
On reading comprehension questions, write down A-E on a scratch paper and star, cross out, or put a question mark next to each letter as you work through the choices. This can help organize your thinking, especially on challenging questions.
We’re confident that this course teaches the core techniques and formulas you’ll see on exam day. Still, there are endless ways to present a question, and you can’t prepare for every variation. You should expect a few “unknown” questions. The goal is to make them approachable by breaking them down into familiar parts.
ETS is constantly creating new exam questions. However, they all test the same set of principles you’ve already learned. You already have the tools to answer every question; the challenge is recognizing how to apply them.
A single question might test a multitude of principles at once. Earning a top percentile score requires creativity and the ability to zoom out and see the whole picture. If a question feels too complicated, break it into smaller pieces, or plug in numbers. Start with the value the question is asking for, then ask what you’d need in order to solve for that value. If the question is abstract and doesn’t give concrete values, ask what information would be enough to determine a possible value, and work from there.
If you get stumped and have no clue how to attack a question, that’s alright. Take your best guess, flag the question for review later, and move on so you can approach other questions with a clear mind. Since questions vary in difficulty, it’s usually not worth spending too much time on a single tricky one when there are easier points available elsewhere.
Even when you can’t determine the correct answer with certainty, educated guessing can still improve your score.
For quantity comparison questions, we recommend selecting the answer choice D if you feel you have no idea how to proceed. This isn’t because D is the most common answer choice, but because if the question feels impossible to resolve, it may be that there isn’t enough information to determine the relationship. Those “cannot be determined” questions often have D as the answer.
Be wary of extremes in reading comprehension, since they’re frequently used as trap choices.
Always guess synonym pairs on sentence equivalence questions. If you know two words are not close in meaning, it’s unlikely they’re both correct, so don’t choose them - even when you’re guessing.
Reviewing practice tests carefully is where much of the improvement happens.
Always thoroughly review the questions you got incorrect, solving them a second time while you’re reviewing to ensure you thoroughly understand them.
If you notice that you took more time on specific question types, take a moment to ask yourself why those questions took more time. Was it because you couldn’t remember a formula? Or did you have difficulty breaking down a complex question into its component parts? Understanding where you’re spending too much time will allow you to study/practice those areas and improve.
Diagnostic tests (i.e., practice exam sections) have two purposes: 1) to get you used to the pace of the exam, and 2) to give you an estimate of your score.
If you’ve already taken a couple of practice tests, you should have a sense of the speed required to finish each section on time. From there, use practice tests strategically to measure progress toward your target score.
It’s not productive to take back-to-back practice tests without spending time reviewing them. That approach can burn you out, and it usually won’t lead to long-term score increases because you’re not giving yourself time to learn from mistakes and consolidate what you’ve studied. Practice tests matter, but most of your study time should be spent learning and practicing - not doing timed testing.
Practice test scores are diagnostic scores. They don’t predict your exact test-day score. Even the official ETS practice tests aren’t perfect predictors.
Also, as you study more, you’ll start to recognize questions from your practice bank. That can tempt you to skip calculations and jump straight to an answer from memory, which can skew your score. The goal of practice exams is to simulate the real exam experience and identify weak areas for additional study - not to get the highest possible practice score.
On the actual exam, the questions will look fresh, and they won’t follow the exact templates you’ve seen. Our questions imitate the most recent GRE questions available, but ETS is always writing new problems, and there are endless ways to test the same concepts. Regardless of how a question is worded, it will still test the same principles you’ve studied.
We highly encourage everyone to take the free PowerPrep practice tests from ETS for additional perspective. When you sign up for the exam, ETS will send you instructions on how to access these.
Exams can be anxiety-inducing, but you can prepare for them in a way that makes test day feel familiar. In the last days or weeks before your exam, use the Achievable system as intended and follow the best practices in this section.
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