How To Start Your GRE® Studies

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Transcript

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Welcome to the GRE Strategy Podcast. You're here because you believe there's a better way to study for the GRE, and so do we. We created the GRE strategy to maximize your results and minimize your efforts so you can get to the fun parts about graduate school as quickly and as painlessly as possible. My name is Isaac Polya, and I've been teaching GRE classes and tutoring privately for the GRE for over a decade, and I've helped tens of thousands of students get into the graduate schools of their choice. I'm excited to be a part of your graduate school journey since we all at TGS believe that our world can benefit from the best possible professionals that we can find. If this show is bringing you value, please share it with your friends and family who are studying so that together we can make this process as easy and as painless as it can possibly be. Let's go. Today, let's talk about how to start your GRE studies. I'm going to give a light overview of all the topics that we're going to cover, and then we'll get into hopefully the right amount of detail so that you can make great decisions going forward. So the very first thing that you're going to want to do is learn a little bit about the format of the exam and the different question types, just in case you're brand, brand new to the process. And again, we'll get into that in a moment. The second thing you'll want to do, even if it sounds a little scary, is you're going to want to take a baseline practice practice exam so that you can optimize your paths to success. Again, more detail on that in a moment. Third, you'll want to plan based on that initial baseline practice test result. Or if you're too scared to take the practice test, you'll want to plan based on how you feel. And we'll talk about some of the trade-offs there. But usually that process is going to involve selecting the best resources that you can get and just executing well on your study plan. At the end, I'll talk a little bit about some tips that I think you're going to find very, very helpful in accelerating your progress through all the above and also avoiding some of the big mistakes that I see people make in this process every single year. So first and foremost, let's get into the details of the format of the test. And I'm going to go really fast with this because probably most of you are already familiar. But just in case you didn't know, the GRE always begins with an essay, which is followed by two quant sections, math sections, and two verbal sections, which test reading, logic, and vocabulary. So we'll go super in depth on the details of what's in the quant, what's in the verbal, and all that stuff in future episodes. But for now, I think that might bog you down more than it helps you. And so it's just good to know roughly what's in there and uh that the full exam takes about two hours start to finish with no breaks in between the sections. And um, you can take it in person or you can take it online at home. Even how to do that and how to make that decision is a little bit of a deep topic. So uh for now, just both know that um, excuse me, know that both are good options. And uh it just depends on what you're most comfortable with. There's some trade-offs there. Uh, but at the beginning of this process, we want to get you momentum and get you headed in the right direction. And you can dive into the specific details that you need later on because maybe you're already sold on taking it online, and so I don't want to burn a bunch of time at the start of this episode getting really, really, really in the weeds with that. So, first step. Personally, I like the GRE mini quiz that is on ETS.org. It's 10 questions long, and it's gonna give you a decent feel for the types of questions that you're gonna see within each section. There's a couple math questions based on the math that's tested on the GRE, which is in general up to about high school level geometry. So, like in terms of mathematical complexity, I wouldn't call it overly complex. There's no calculus, there's no trigonometry, anything like that. Uh, but it's considered a quote unquote reasoning test, meaning just knowing the math and doing straightforward math questions is usually not enough to see really high scores on the exam. Now, these are all really sweeping generalizations. I don't know how you're gonna perform on the exam. Maybe you're so naturally gifted at standardized test math that it's gonna require no preparation on your part and you're just gonna breeze through it, but that's not the case for most of us. And so an intelligent plan up front and a little bit of knowledge helps, and that's why we're here right now. So um for the the mini quiz, you'll also see a couple of the verbal type questions. There'll be some slightly longer readings, there'll be some vocabulary questions, and it doesn't take that long to complete. So don't worry about accuracy or knowledge on that initial mini quiz. It's you're just working to get through it to kind of get a feel for the different types of questions of like, oh, right, you know, I I probably did remember how to do algebra by hand at some point in my past. Hopefully you still remember it. Um so just uh just search GRE Miniquiz ETS in case the link in the description changes over time. But we're gonna do our best to have an updated link for you. But ETS changes things without telling us sometimes, and so we just we don't want to send you off on a bad link bonanza and uh get you stuck when what we're really trying to do is accelerate your progress and get you some positive motion here. So you will probably need an ETS.org account to take the mini quiz, and we'll see if that changes as well. So please don't hold us to that. But as of today, that's the case. You're going to need an ETS.org account anyway to register for the exam and to get the recommended practice tests. And so it's a good first step to just like make that and get it out of the way. And if you didn't know, ETS is the organization that produces the GRE, writes the questions, et cetera. And so you're going to hear about ETS a lot since they're a big player in this particular game. So after you take that mini quiz and just get sort of loosely familiar with the material, the strongest recommendation I can make is just dive right into a baseline practice exam. There's a free one available from ETS.org, and it's it's a lot more accurate than any third-party simulations that I've personally seen. Maybe there's some great third-party simulations out there that I haven't seen in the multiple decades that I've been doing this, but probably not unless they just released them in the last five minutes. Uh, so because you're going to want really, really accurate data to make the most accurate plan, which is going to lead to the most efficient plan, you want the most accurate baseline practice exam. And the compounding benefits of that over the coming days, weeks, and months for you are more than worth the effort of just getting that first baseline exam done. Again, you'll want to budget about two hours start to finish. Now, as of today's recording, you will want to go to the practice exam purchase page and you'll want to scroll all the way to the bottom, and you're going to want to find power prep number two, which should be a zero dollar item. Now, you may have to hunt for it a little bit. It's not always easy to find. Sometimes the website gets reorganized, but just FYI as of today, this might change in the future, but as of today, Power Prep One does not provide you a score, and you're going to need that score to be able to plan the next steps of optimizing your prep properly. Now, if you're just too nervous to take an initial practice exam this soon, that's very understandable. You can proceed with the next steps that I'm going to talk through just based on how you feel. But you'll just want to know that you're giving up some efficiency in exchange for comfort. And that might be the right trade for you. There's definitely no judgment here. I just want to be real with you, and I want you to know that you're giving up that efficiency because only that first test data can really show you where you are for sure strong and weak. Where you where you feel strong and weak is probably mostly accurate. But a lot of times people are surprised by that initial baseline exam. Sometimes it diverges from the experience they've had academically. For example, some people don't feel they're naturally great at math. They end up performing better than expected on the math section. And knowing all that for sure with some hard data from the exam definitely saves you time because you can select a program of study on a foundation of real feedback. Now, of course, you're free to select a program just based on how you feel without that data. I just recommend being honest with yourself about the trade you're making and know that you may end up having to put in a little bit of extra time to the process as a result of not having a plan that was optimized with hardcore data from the very start. But again, that might be the right trade for you. And there's nothing wrong with that. I just want you to be able to make informed decisions. That's my role in your prep. I'm very, very rarely going to make heavy-handed decisions. Sometimes I will. And I promise I always have very, very good reasons that are aligned with your incentives for making those heavy-handed recommendations. But in general, you want to do this process in a way that works for you, but you do want to know what the trade-offs are. And I think that's really what's missing in the industry right now as I survey it and as we uh start this particular project to make all of you as consumers more informed, is it's uh just a little bit hard to get around the incentive structure of the industry. Uh every time I go on a site or read a blog, I just feel like someone's kind of pushing an agenda or a perspective rather than just trying to help me. And I don't think it should be that way. Um now, I'm not expecting you to take my word for that. I know there's a lot of people online saying all kinds of stuff all the time, and we should be very skeptical of most of what most people say most of the time, if we're being real. Uh, so I'm not expecting you to trust me from the jump. Uh, trust is earned. I'm totally comfortable with that. I believe that the recommendations that I'm gonna give you, if you abide by them, are going to hold up for you well. And I believe that over time you'll be like, man, you know, really appreciate that guy. Really appreciate TGS. They did me a solid there up front. They didn't have to do that. That's my objective. And I'm gonna do everything I can, and everybody else behind the scenes here at TGS on the team is gonna do everything they can as well. And we may sometimes fail at that, and I apologize in advance, but I believe that the upside will greatly, greatly, greatly outweigh the downside for you. And this is what I needed when I was in your shoes many years ago, and it it did not exist. And so again, we're just trying to fix that problem for everybody. Okay. So, quick word about practice tests, just tying that off. First step GRE mini quiz. If you start to really kind of like crumble and break down in tears, because you're like, oh my gosh, I can't do algebra and this is gonna be so hard, and I don't even know where to begin, and so much is writing on this, and I should have started this six months ago. Look, I have been there and I have worked with hundreds of people who who just they they literally broke down in tears the first time they started doing GRE questions. And this happens all the time, and it should be discussed more. If if that's you, then we've got a math basics series that we'll link for you below. And we've tried to be as gentle as possible in just reintroducing some of those basic concepts for you there. And we've got a ton of resources linked from that. And I think that you will find that very helpful if you're that specific type of person. Otherwise, strongest recommendation is just hop right into that first practice exam when you've got a couple hours. The GRE mini quiz is maybe 15 to 30 minutes, including the account creation. So that should be hopefully no big deal, low friction way to start. And then if you're like, look, I get why it's a good idea to take a practice test up front, but there's just no way I'm gonna bring myself to do that. Again, totally understand. I think just hopping into these next steps and picking a provider is gonna be the right move for you. So that's kind of the full spectrum of least confidence to most confidence to most of us will be somewhere in between those two extremes. And uh you can always reach us if you have any questions about anything we're presenting here. You can reach us at our public email address, which is the GRE Strategy Team at gmail.com, or you can reach us at the GRE Strategy on current social channels, and we'll link that contact information for you in the description as well. So, what materials should you use? You either have that baseline practice exam data that you can use to figure out where am I strong, where am I weak, and I trust you to make that assessment based on what you see there. And again, you can reach out to us if you're unsure and we're happy to help. But you probably have a good idea. And then if you avoided that baseline practice test for whatever reason, then you're just gonna kind of go with your gut and say, like, I think I need a better quant program, or I I think I need a better verbal program, or I think I need some books, or the books aren't really gonna work with me. I need a human for accountability. You can you can definitely trust your intuition there, but I'm also gonna give you a framework for making those calls. So, what materials should I use? This is is a combination of learning style, budget, and your timeline. So starting with learning style, just based on your history, just ask yourself in what types of environments have I learned the most and learned the best? Have I learned the most and the best from books and reading? Have I learned the best and most from uh digital video or like self-paced type e-learning situations? Uh, or do I do best with a live instruction environment where I have to go to a physical location, or could an online live instruction environment work for me? Or do I just really need the one-on-one, fully customized thing, or maybe some combination of those things. So just reflect on your learning so far and what's optimal for you. Some of you are gonna be the totally self-paced, just give me the free plan and I'm gonna figure it all out on my own type of person. That's fine. We'll talk about that in a second and how to optimize that. And then some of you are gonna be like, just give me the simple software, that's all I want. And some of you are gonna be like, money's no object, just give me the best, fastest thing that money can buy. And I don't really care about cutting a big check. So let's run through all of that. And just again, just reflecting on your history should be more than enough for you to feel like you know what you're doing. You don't need to second guess it too much. I wouldn't recommend doing too much research uh beyond whatever you feel is right for you. I would just go with what you feel is right for you and then do heavy research within that domain. I'll give you some recommendations for what I like the best, but there's lots and lots of providers in the GRA space. There's lots of softwares, there's lots of free plans, there's lots of one-on-one tutors, there's lots of live classes. If you just want to be like this Isaac guy seems like he knows what he's talking about, I'm just running with what he gives me. That's cool. I'll give you my recommendations and what I personally prefer. But there's no pressure to take those recommendations. Like I said, uh my goal is to just help you out. So that's that's gonna be what we will hopefully accomplish here together. Now, the reason you want to reflect on the learning style is kind of obvious, but worth saying, no one wants to or should be studying for this thing longer than necessary. It's already a big time and energy investment. And for most of us, the vast, vast, vast majority of us, it's just a means to an end. We just want want to go to grad school, have that cool experience, and then get to the next level in our careers. And that's very understandable. So it's hard to be perfect with all these upfront choices, but I'd recommend just making the best bet that you can from the start. And then you can always change gears. You can always change gears down the line if whatever you choose doesn't end up being the right thing. So that's learning style. So hopefully you've thought a little bit about that. If not, pause and just reflect on that. The uh next criteria is uh your budget, and that's that's going to be balanced with your desired timeline because this probably won't come as any surprise. Like the more you can afford to invest, the less risk you're gonna have in the process and the faster you can progress because you'll just have access to better stuff. This isn't true in every domain of life, but it's for sure true in this domain. Um, and that's not saying that just because something's a low price doesn't mean it's not a good fit for you or that you're not gonna get great results with that. I want to be really, really clear with that. Also, it doesn't mean that just because something's expensive, that means it's great. But I'm just saying by and large, if you're gonna do it for free, then you're gonna have to do a lot of organization that you wouldn't have to do if you bought a pre-baked solution. And maybe that's obvious. Maybe the free plan is still the best plan for you. I'm just saying, like, that's the kind of general trend that we've seen. I'm gonna share some data with you that we've collected across many, many, many data points at this point. You may be the exception to the rule for sure. Not trying to put my values on you, not trying to tell you how your future is going to go. Again, just trying to help you make informed decisions. You can still go against the recommendations and the data. That's your choice. If I were in your shoes, I would just want to know what the data says. And then I can know if I'm going against the grain or if I'm just making the bet on the numbers. Okay. So let's start with free. Some of you have no option except to do a free plan. And so that's what you're going to do. And uh we'll be dropping full like how to make a GRE study plan and like actual study plan episodes soon. So be on the lookout for that. Hopefully, we'll have some blog material up for you uh at this point. But um, our entire business has been completely word of mouth and referral-based for like decades at this point. Uh and we've never advertised for our GRE services. And so we're still bringing a lot of this stuff online. Uh, so so just bear with us here in these first few months as we're getting things off the ground. Um yeah. So back to the desired score gain and timeline thing. Let's just go from free all the way up to most expensive. So again, starting with free, this may be your only option. Hopefully, we've got some really killer-free resources for you there. But even if we don't, if you just web search free GRE study plan, you're gonna find some really, really good advice out there. There's a there's a lot of blogs, there's a lot of seasoned professionals in the industry. I don't want you for one minute to think that we're your only option. We may be the best option for you, but our programs, and just to be transparent with you, we we do have programs. Our programs are not a fit for everybody. And that's a huge part of the reason we're making a push to get the free material out there, because our perspective is valuable and important to people, whether they work with us or not. Um, so again, I don't want to pretend like our podcast is the best podcast for you, or that our blog is the best blog for you. It may not be. If you're not resonating with this, that's cool. I get it. I don't resonate with everybody online, even if they are super awesome. Um so just want you to know you've got options. Here's what we've seen with the data. Free plans tend to take the longest amount of time in terms of raw hours. That's just what the data says. I'm not saying that's gonna be the case for you. Some of you are gonna do the free plan and you're gonna study for five days and you're gonna get the perfect score because you're just way smarter than I am. You're way better at standardized tests than I am. And I struggled like crazy with these things, even though I was a really good student and I didn't really struggle academically up until it was time for me to go to grad school. And then I was like, holy smokes, what was I missing in elementary school here? Um, so that's what's kept me in this line of work for quite some time is um when I was in your shoes, I I was I was confident academically, and then the test kind of took that confidence away. And that's because I I didn't have the right roadmap. Um, I was trying to treat it like a normal school test, and and sometimes that can work for certain people, but it just didn't work for me. And so I had to do a lot of just mental scaffolding, mindset scaffolding, a lot of just hardcore problem solving and work and changing my study routine and just basically like becoming a whole different type of test taker and student over the course of months when I was studying for this stuff back in the day. And if that's you, I just want you to know you're not alone because for me, I started like doubting whether I could even uh do the process. Like I thought, like, oh man, maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was, maybe I'm not as cut out for academia as I thought I was, maybe graduate school is not for me. And that that was completely, completely untrue. And now being on the other side of that and understanding how uh good of a thing I was doing by going through the process and and betting on myself, like you're doing right now. Uh, I just don't want anyone to have those feelings. Yes, the process might be a struggle for you. We're gonna try to make it easy. And we probably can make it much easier, but we may not be able to make it easy. We will try. But there may be some challenges ahead. But it's it's almost certainly not the hardest thing you've ever done in life. Like as a human being on planet Earth, for as long as you've been alive, you've probably done way harder stuff than this is about to be. So just to kind of calibrate that. But at the same time, like why should we have people out there suffering and deleting their belief in their self needlessly when maybe a podcast and a blog post would help with that? So that's why we're here. So now that all those caveats are out of the way, what we've seen is about 60 hours of free plan study for each one-point gain you want to make on each individual subsection score. So if you want a 10-point gain from a 155 in quant to a 165 in quant, and you're using only free resources, putting zero dollars into the process, on average, we have seen that take people about 600 hours. So these are just averages. You may be way faster or way slower than that. I'm just sharing our data. It's about 10,000 data points, and you can make of that what you will. Again, you don't have to believe any of this stuff. Just sharing with you what I've seen. And I am right about the data. I don't know if I'm right about you. Okay. So that's free plans. Now, why do free plans take longer than other stuff? I already kind of touched on this. You'll have to assemble the materials yourself. You'll have to be completely accountable to just yourself. It may be easier to get distracted with no external accountability. You may have to reinvent your study plan and your habit and build your discipline up, like I had to do. Like a lot of the process I went through wasn't even just the study process. It was like almost becoming like a different type of student and like just a more consistent, more disciplined human, honestly. I think I really lacked a lot of the key character traits that I needed to be successful. And this process exposed that for me. And looking back on it, it was really positive, but it felt very not positive at the time. And so because I was trying to do my whole process for free, it took me months and months and months longer than it could have if I uh had made an investment up front. Again, not saying you should do that. Just want you to know that irrespective of the hours estimate, the trade-off with free is yes, the upside is no capital outlay. The downside is more risk. It could take you longer than it would take if you did make the investment, but you won't know for sure because nobody can predict the future exactly. And so you just need to make good bets. All right. Now, the nice thing about free is you can start with free, see how that goes. If you have success with it, amazing. Double down on it, keep going. If you're struggling, you can always pivot to a paid provider at that point. And there's there's no problem with that whatsoever. So moving up the cost sphere from just above zero dollars, you get into the printed book material range. And this is usually somewhere in the 100 to $300 range. You can definitely get some $50 stuff, you can definitely get some thousand dollar stuff, but like on average, it's somewhere around that. Uh so what are you buying there? Based on our data, we've seen people studying with books take about 55-0 hours of study for each one-point game they want to make. So going from $155 to $165 on your quant score would be about $500. Again, these are just averages. There's no guarantees on this. Uh, it's just what we've seen. We've scraped a ton of sources. This is what came back. So what are you buying here? You're buying back hours into your life. So here you could buy back about 100 hours of life for, let's say, on average, one $100 to $200. So that's about $2 an hour of what you're what your um sort of uh yeah, you're you if you if you could let's put it this way, if you can make more than $2 an hour at work, then it's probably a really good trade. If you make less than $2 an hour at work, then you should probably go to work instead and just study for free, if that makes sense. Um so it's not that you need to be that rational or that calculated or that like financial model-ish when you're going down this process. Uh it's just one framework you can use. And again, like I said at the beginning, you can trust your gut as well. And uh you can always make a pivot if it turns out that your intuition was wrong from the jump. But again, if I was in your shoes, I would have wanted someone like me to be like, hey, just so you know, these are the numbers. So that's that's what I'm giving you. Just trying to treat other people how I want to be treated. Now, if you want my recommendation for printed books, I've had the best experience with the Manhattan Prep GRE printed strategy guys. Other recomm people recommend other books all the time. Those can certainly work. Uh I'm not even necessarily recommending that you study with books. I'm just saying if you just want a clean, quick recommendation, that's what I'd recommend. And I think you'll have the best experience there. That's true for about 80% of people who I've talked to who've studied with printed material. So it's a pretty good bet, even though it's hard to give perfect advice in a public format like this, where I may have never spoken with you directly and I don't know the specifics of your situation. So again, books aren't going to be a good fit for everybody because uh, again, you'll need a lot of personal accountability, but at least you'll have one source of truth that you can go to and just say, like, okay, I don't need to go on YouTube, I don't need to go on any web search bonanzas here, I don't need to go down any TikTok rabbit holes here. I'm just opening up the book and I'm working through the book, and that's worked for me in the past. So that's what I'm gonna do. No problem with that. Go for it and only switch gears if you're not seeing results. So that's books. Moving up the cost sphere from there, you've got digital self-paced classes. So this is like software-based, um web-based classes, uh, where there's no live instruction, just to be clear. So these tend to average out somewhere in the 300 to 1000 range, um, with one notable exception that we'll get to in a moment. Uh, some bill monthly, some are a flat one-time uh upfront investment. And the numbers on these are roughly uh 40 hours of study for each one-point gain. So going from 155 to 165 in my quant section, I'm gonna figure about 400 hours end to end. So what's what's the good thing about digital self-paced classes? Well, you get you get structure, you get organization. Like I said, you get the single source of source of truth. If you're more uh if you get if you learn better from video rather than a book, probably worth the initial investment. Um yeah. So despite the the um appearances, like there's a lot of similarities of these uh digital self-baced platforms, and um there's there's a lot of brands in the space. Um yeah, and if if this is the route that you you want to go personally, then um you you want to just pick the one that that resonates with you the most. So like the the most uh reputable brands would be like Magosh, Target Test Prep Prep, and Greg Mat. Um Greg Mat is is for sure the least expensive as of the recording here. So if if you're that budget conscious consumer, that's probably a good bet for you. Uh Magush is kind of in the middle ground, and then Target Test Prep, I think, is one of the on the more expensive side. Uh so again, I I would just check out the free trials. You know, that's the nice thing about software, is they can let you try the product with basically no cost to them. And so they often let you do that. So if there is a free trial, I would check that out. And yeah, whatever you personally resonate with tends tends to work well in this regard. Again, you're just trying to make a good initial bet. And if you make the wrong bet, then you just switch gears and gauged against the checks you're gonna write to go to graduate school, like most of this stuff is gonna be a rounding error at best. But I do want to be sensitive to people who are budget conscious, and maybe some of these softwares are gonna be a stretch for you, but it still could be worth it for the video-based learning thing. So again, just going back to the math, now you're buying back 200 hours versus the free option. So if we say the average investment is around 800 bucks, then we're buying back time at a rate of $8 an hour. Uh again, you're buying back about 100 hours for eight bucks, uh, 800 bucks, sorry. So it might be way slower than that. I don't know. I'm just giving you an idea so you can make an informed decision. It also might be way faster than that. Um I think that's probably more than enough there to help you make a good decision. But like I said, you can reach out to us anytime if um you want more advice. And every time I try to web search and kind of put myself in your shoes of like best uh GRE prep course or something on on a web search tool, um, I just get really confusing stuff. I I don't know why. Uh there just tends to be like a lot of noise, a lot of loud voices, a lot of opinions. Um so yeah, I think if you're considering the software stuff, check out the free trial and and just go with what you like. It's just that's what I've found works best for most people. And I don't really have a clear favorite amongst uh the softwares um personally. So moving up the cost sphere, we get to live classes. This is usually like in the 1,000 to 2,000 uh US dollar range, give or take. And it usually speeds up the process. Uh so here we've seen about 30 hours of study for each one-point gain on the overall score. So 155 to 165 in my quant section or in my verbal section, or trying to go from 320 to 330, probably about 300 hours of total study. So what's helpful here? Well, yeah, the trade-off is larger capital outlay. For some of you, you're like $1,500. Why is it so cheap? For some of you, you're like $1,500. There's no way. And there's everyone in between two. Uh, so what are you getting? You're getting a live instructor. You're getting a seasoned expert, someone who's been vetted by the company. You can ask questions, you can interrupt the lesson to get clarity. Uh, you don't have to like go back and forth with an AI chat bot because you didn't get something in a video. Some of you are like, what are you talking about? I love this AI chat bot. That's cool. That's cool. Um, some of you are like, I never want to deal with AI ever again in my life. Why are they pushing this on me? Just giving you options depending on your learning style and what you like. Um, so the live class thing can be great for that because you can just go straight to the human touch. Some of you really want that. And and also human accountability, something that's worth considering. So um, you can ask people to repeat something in a different way. Um, and you can maybe even get a little bit of support outside of class, but different companies have different policies about that. So I don't want to make any promises on anyone else's behalf. Often you'll have other students in the class. Some people find that helpful and uh kind of like a fun journey with the with a new social group. Other people find it harmful where they're annoyed that someone's going faster than them, or they're annoyed that someone's going slower than them. And it's just great that there's a lot of options these days. You don't have to do the live course if you don't want to. Uh going back to the math, let's figure about 1500 on average for these. So now you're buying back time at about uh $15 an hour. So 100 hours faster than a live course. Sorry, 100 out 100 hours faster than a software digital self-paced course. Again, these are just averages. Maybe the fastest path for you is going to be free. I don't know. But this is just what I've seen, a lot of data. So if you make more than 15 bucks an hour at work, this is probably a really good investment. If you make less than 15 US dollars an hour at work, you should probably go to work and make that money and not do the live class and find something less expensive. Uh, just if you want the pure numerical arbitrage there. Most of the time, these are good bets for people who just want that live experience for whatever reason. You just know your learning style, you're what you're willing to put the money into it. Uh, this is probably going to be the path for you. Personally, if I were going to do a live class, I like test crackers, uh, T-E-S-T-C-R-A, C K E R S. They're a smaller brand. Uh, they're not this like huge multinational brand. They're local to the San Francisco Bay Area, uh, but they do online courses. And um yeah, I think they're just good people. Uh, I've worked with them in the past. Um, I don't have any brand affiliation with them anymore. I don't have any referral relationships with them. Uh, there's no financial incentive for me to send them to you uh or you to them. It's just my personal preference when it comes to live classes. But there's there's quite a few different live classes out there. If you're more that big brand shopper, you're one web search away from getting a million Google ads or Chat GPT ads or whatever the case may be these days, uh from from getting like lots and lots of options for live classes, boot camps, it's it's kind of all the same thing, just that just that cohort type learning environment. Um, so yeah, that's just what I personally recommend, but it's it's totally up to you. So if you're just looking for a quick rec, that's it. If you want to do some deeper research on that, then by all means, diligence generally pays off as an investor. So highly recommend that you do diligence if that's your style. At the top of the cost sphere, you're gonna have private tutors one-on-one instruction. Big, big cost range here. You could get one session, sometimes for 50 bucks. Depends. That's unusual. Most good, most really, really good, skilled, seasoned professionals are in the $100 to $300 an hour range, but that can be a little eye-watering for people. And so total tutoring programs are gonna be somewhere in the 2,000 to 10,000-ish range. And believe me, not even the sky's the limit in terms of what you can drop on hourly tutoring. I mean, you could you could probably drop 50 grand if you really wanted to. But that's unusual. That's super, super unusual. Most people are gonna land in that kind of like 2,000 to 10,000 range. Probably most people on the lower side. But it's there, and it's just for reference purposes, it's good to know what these numbers look like. And people aren't always transparent about their pricing. So trying to give you an idea. Um, obviously, we're gonna price a lot of people out at this range, uh, but in general, this is the fastest. And that probably will not come as any surprise if you just think about it logically. Everything's customized around your specific learning style, your specific pace, your specific strengths and weaknesses. You don't have to wait for someone else in the class to get something explained. It's just all about you. Uh, so it's it's definitely a higher touch, more premium experience, as long as you get a good fit. And hopefully you're not gonna hire someone who you don't like working with. So keep that in mind. Um if you need a cheaper option, don't worry about that. You're still gonna have success. The main determinant in your success is your individual effort and how resourceful you are personally. That's gonna be the main determining factor in your success. And it's very, very hard to buy yourself out of that. Like you're gonna need some resourcefulness and some initiative at some point in this process, even with the most skilled tutor. They're not probably gonna come to your house every day and wake you up with uh, you know, megaphone and say, all right, it's time for uh GRE Droll Sargent time. Uh but who knows? Maybe there's space in the market for that product. So, you know, if that's what you're looking for, I guess uh let us know and maybe maybe we can find something for you. Um but uh sorry, just that mental image is kind of kind of cracking me up right now. Um so yeah, expensive but fast. That's what you're getting here. This is this is like Ferrari instead of budget used vehicle, I guess. Uh so I'm not gonna specifically name any tutors because uh I've just noticed the space moves really, really quickly. Like people come and go. It's a lot of people do it part-time, like they're in grad school and they did well on the GRE, so they're kind of just making some posts and seeing what comes back and the DMs. Um, and that's cool. That's cool. You know, I I did that when I was in school, and it was a great thing on on both sides. You know, helped a lot of people, they helped me. Um, so not not trying to discourage or throw shade or anything like that, just letting you know that some people do that, and that's that's why people come and go from the marketplace pretty quickly. And then you've got the long-term long haulers who've been doing it for 20, 30 years. And uh, shout out to my people right there. Um so my best advice for finding a great tutor is not a singular individual. It's it's to ask your network for referrals. Try to talk with at least three top professionals or people who come highly recommended. You're usually going to get the best referrals from people you know, people who've had success with these other people who know you, who are like, oh, you got to try my gal, or you got to try my guy. She was awesome. He was awesome. She crushed it for me. I got into XYZ school that I really wanted to go to. Just at least have a convo with them. Um and the nice thing about many one-on-one tutors is um they're very, very generous, caring people. That's that's why they work in education in the first place. And so that they'll often do a free intro call with you. And so you can kind of get a feel for what that relationship's like. Um, so I I highly encourage you to do that. I think at least three of those calls, you'll you'll be able to make a good bet. Uh, there's some some good advice out there that I didn't make up, but I I subscribe to it for sure, and it's proven to be true in in my life as well. Um, and it's from a very, very successful individual by all measures of the word. Um and he told me in a lot of areas of life, things are very counterintuitive. Like when you're running a business, the thing that you thought would be common sense is not always common sense. Um, or when you're taking the GRE, for example, a lot of times the things that we've been conditioned to do on previous school exams end up hurting us on this exam. Because, like I said, it's like a reasoning test, not just a pure memorization test. There's some memorization involved, don't get me wrong, uh, quite a bit actually for most of us on the vocab side. But just memorizing stuff was more than enough for me to get through pretty much every exam I ever took when I was in school. It was not enough for me to get a great GRE score. Uh, so that's a little counterintuitive. It wasn't what I was expecting when I started the process. So you can't always trust your intuition in certain domains, but what you can generally trust your intuition is with people. We tend to have good people intuition. So that's why I'm saying talk to three people, and you can probably just pick whoever you like best. Um, it tends to work out well when it comes to tutoring. Um now, of course, you can you can go down the review rabbit holes, you can you can do the whole like, you know, have an AI scrape the entire internet and tell me this person's entire professional history, like whatever your style is, you know, go for it. Uh, but if there was a place to use intuition in this process, it's it's picking your provider based on the vibe. Like that's totally, totally okay to do. Um final point here. If you have an admissions consultant already, someone who's helping you out with the next step of the process, and they recommend a tutor that they like, that's that's definitely a really, really good uh data point. Uh but just FYI, a lot of people do have financial referral partner relationships. Um you just want to do a little bit of diligence and and talk to other people. You may still end up going with that recommendation from your admissions consultant. It's common because you probably trust your admissions consultant or you wouldn't have hired him or her. Um but it's just something to keep in mind that it's okay to talk to other people, even if you eventually just end up going with that recommendation anyway. And I think making informed decisions tends to lead us to making good choices, and our results tend to be a direct outcome of our choices. So, just again, trying to make you an informed consumer here. If you need a recommendation for a tutor and you're striking out with your network, like you don't know anyone else who's gone down this path before, just shoot us a DM at the GRE strategy, like I said, or email us uh once again, the GRE strategy team, the GRE strategy team at Gmail. And uh we'll ask you some questions about your situation, make sure that we understand what you're struggling with and what's going well, and then we can make you a recommendation. Again, we don't have any paid referral relationships with anybody. We don't get any kickbacks, they don't send us leads because we send them leads. There's none of that. Uh so this is going to be as unbiased as we can personally make it. It's just we biased based on our experience and what we've seen from many, many, many years of doing this. So the math on tutoring, you're probably looking at about 20 hours of study for each one-point gain. Again, huge range here. Some people are two hours of study for each one point gain. That's rare, but I've seen it. Some people are a hundred hours of study for each one point gain. Again, super, super rare, but it it has happened. So if you're looking for a hundred point gain, uh, maybe you're looking at like 200 hours, give or take. So it can be quite a bit faster. It can be quite a bit faster than some of the other options if you can get someone who's good. But of course, the trade there is larger financial outlays. So let's just say on average, maybe a reasonable expectation of a full end to end tutoring program is like 3,000. US dollars or so. You're buying another hundred hours back versus what you would get with a live class. So maybe you're thinking about $30 an hour there. If you're making more than $30 an hour at work, that's probably a really good trade on your time. If you're making less than $30 an hour at work, it might not be worth it for you. But if you have substantial savings or you have a grant or you have a trust fund, that can work out great. You can put that to your advantage. And whoever gave you that grant probably is going to be stoked that you're putting it into education. I don't know for sure, but it tends to go that way. And if you're like, man, that sounds great, but there's just no way that I'm going to be able to afford something like that, then just don't worry about it. Don't worry about it at all. Just focus on great execution. Like I said, the number one factor in your success is going to be your personal resourcefulness and initiative. The provider you choose is just a helpful accelerator if you want it. Okay, so that's the basic rundown of private providers in the space. Again, if you're unsure how to make a decision, just let us know. But you probably already have a good feel just based on that discussion about what sounds good to you. So at this point, you will have your baseline exam or kind of your baseline gut feel. And hopefully you'll have your provider, whether that be free or the most expensive or something in between. And at this point, you're not going to be surprised by this advice, but I'm going to give it anyway because I needed to hear it when I was in your shoes, which is it's time to just put your head down and just block out all the distractions, all the ads for other GRE prep providers, all the message boards, all the forums. And just do what your provider tells you to do. If you like the free study plan, just make that your homepage on the website and just don't even go to any other websites during GRE time. Okay. Just focus on that. Uh forums can be great for getting doubts cleared, getting emotional support, feeling like you're part of a community. If you're that kind of person, then I encourage you to use forums. If you're not that kind of person, I'd just be careful with the forums because there is like a social media effect on forums where the people who are incentivized to post are the people who do the best, who are the most talented, who lead who needed the least help, and the people who are doing the worst and struggling the most. And so like most of you are going to be in between those two extremes. And so you're you're not going to be heavily represented on those forums. And so you can kind of get into this weird bubble where you feel like everybody's better than you or everybody's worse than you. And like none of that, usually none of that helps you prepare or or get results faster. So that's why I'm saying just block out the noise if you can. Oh, but there are a lot of experts on there who will give you free advice based on your situation. Um, so so that can have a ton of value. And, you know, it's pretty awesome that we live in a world where these people are incentivized to do that, to grow their business. So I think it's a good thing to take advantage of. Um now, again, back to the whole social media effect thing. Like, some posts are not legit. You'll probably be able to sniff those out pretty easily. Some posts are super legit. And again, that's that's why I'm saying like I understand trust is earned. I followed a ton of bad advice when I was in your shoes. That sucked. That was a lot of painful but valuable learning experiences. Now I'm more selective about who I take advice from, and that's been really helpful. So, again, if if you could feel like you can trust me, awesome. Promise to do everything I can to maintain and earn that. Uh, but if you don't, like, I'm not going to take that personally, guys. There's a lot of talking heads on the internet. So if you're not seeing results at any point, even though you've had your head down and you're executing super, super well and you're being consistent and you're being disciplined, or at least as consistent and disciplined as you can be as a human being on planet Earth, and there's a lot of distractions out there, then you may need to shift gears. There's a lot writing on this. So don't be afraid to change things up if what you're doing is not working. Uh, but just take a look in the mirror before you make a change and make sure that it's not on you because the provider told you the right thing and then you're not executing properly. I know that can be a difficult conversation to have with yourself, but it's it's very worth it. In general, one of your best assets on this path and in life in general, and certainly in your career, is honesty with yourself. If you can avoid BSing yourself, that's gonna be huge. Uh, but it's weirdly sometimes more difficult than it sounds. Weirdly. That can be a weird thing about being a person. Um, so seek feedback when you can. Um, get around people who aren't afraid to tell you the truth. Um, and and don't worry if it stings a little bit, it's gonna, it's gonna be more than worth it on this particular path. Okay. So I think that's probably everything that you need to know about picking a provider and executing with the provider. Executing with the provider is a lot simpler than it might sound. It's really the less is more approach. Just focus on the thing that you picked. Don't second guess yourself unless the data and the numbers are not moving. That's that's the time to change. But otherwise, just focus on becoming a better executor. It's a great life skill. And we're going to be pushing out a bunch of content about discipline, about consistency. We may link some of our old content about that. Um yeah, we'll we'll see what we can cook up for you in the links in the description here. But if you're listening to this six months from now or a year from now, hopefully all that's built out for you already. Okay, next step is pretty straightforward. When you complete the curriculum that you executed well on, you're going to take another practice exam and assess your progress. So if if they tell you to take an exam in your program before you finish the program, again, just do that. Put your trust in these people until they don't deserve it anymore, meaning they're not moving the numbers for you. Um but people giving you advice should be able to help you move the numbers by and large. So review the exam and learn what you can from it. And if your provider is serving you well, then keep trusting them, keep going down that path. From that first practice test, what I've seen work best, and again, defer to your provider if they disagree with me on this. But if you're going the free route, what I've seen work best is try to just find the top three things that you think are going to improve your score the most and focus 80% of your energy on those top three things that hurt you on the practice test, and then just use 20% of your energy to maintain everything else. What I find with people who do free study programs and what a lot of times slows these folks down is they're trying to work on everything at the same time. And there's times and places in life to do that. I'm not trying to be too like broad with my recommendations, but usually GRE prep is not that time or place. You'll usually get much faster results by focusing on three things, getting really, really, really good, way better at those three things before the next practice test than you will at trying to get better at everything between that second practice test and the third practice test. That's just what I've seen. Again, you might be the exception to the rule. Um, and again, test it out. Like I said, um, I think you'll find that my recommendations hold up well, but maybe not. Maybe you're an edge case that I haven't seen before, and I want to be sensitive to that. Okay, so a couple of final tips here as we wrap. Number one, you're gonna see this a lot, but it's worth saying it again. You'll want to use official materials from ETS as much as you possibly can. It's very, very difficult to replicate official materials well. Some people have have done a decent job of it, but it's still not perfect. I have yet to see perfect replicas of GRE questions, uh, even from the most advanced AI as of today's technology. We'll see. Maybe the next AI is coming out tomorrow. That's going to prove me wrong about that. I'm fine with that. Um, but just as of today, it's not there yet. And we'll update those recommendations with a future episode if it gets there. And these official materials uh come in a lot of different flavors. You can get most of them from ETS.org, and you're just a web search away from the other stuff if you need more than what's available on ETS.org. But that's part of the reason I was saying start there, because there's a lot of good stuff there. And you'll want to see the real types of quant questions. You're gonna see the real types of verbal questions, you're gonna see it's just gonna help you train pattern recognition a lot faster. Okay, so that's my first tip to accelerate your progress. My second tip, short, short, quick hitter, is focus on high quality scratch work, meaning what you're writing down on the paper that you'll have on test day. So on test day, you'll take the GRE on a computer and you cannot interact with what's on the computer screen. You can't highlight or underline or anything like that, like a like a writable surface, uh like a smartphone. You can't do that as of today. You're gonna have separate scrap paper, and so you want to train that way. So even if you're using books, don't write in the books, don't underline stuff in the books. Do that all on a separate piece of scratch paper. And just building that habit and getting used to good scrap paper techniques and auditing your organization skills and being honest with yourself when you miss questions because you didn't write things down well enough. Like all that stuff's gonna serve you super, super, super well, even if it's a little bit humbling, which it definitely was for me. I couldn't believe how important what I wrote down on the page was for my quant score on this thing. Uh, and it it fully transcended my ability to do math. Um, so just trying to set you up for success, tell you the things that I wish someone told me at the beginning. Not a hard thing to implement, starting with good scrap paper technique from the beginning. So should serve you very, very well. Um, and again, always use a separate piece of paper. Don't write in the book or get used to writing on a screen, um, unless the screen simulates how you would write on a real piece of paper, in which case, you know, I've had success with that kind of stuff. Last tip to help you move faster is very counterintuitive. I've talked about that before, but also one of the most uh valuable things that you can do is keep a list of questions that you've seen already that you didn't do such a good job on the first time and revisit those questions and try to resolve them from start to finish using the same steps as if you were seeing them for the first time on a regular basis. I recommend every time you study, uh, but even if it's every two days or once a week, that's way better than what most people do. What I've seen most people do is they make this thing called the error log and then they just put uh every question they get wrong in there and they never look at it again. And that's just not helpful. It's that's a waste of time. Like either be all in on it or or just know that you're yellowing and just taking taking the chance and seeing how it goes. That's that's fine. That's fine. It's again, like not telling you how to make not telling you what decision to make, just helping you make an informed decision based on all the data points that I've seen. So being consistent with that review every time you study is gonna help you build knowledge rather than just exposing yourself to a lot of stuff. And we're gonna have a bunch of content on how to optimize your study time. It's in the pipeline. A lot of it's already filmed and recorded. Uh, we're just backlogged on the editing and producing and and pushing it out stuff for a bunch of different reasons, but um, they're all good reasons. So those are my recommendations for how to start. I tried to strike a good balance of being very thorough, but not being overwhelming. I hope I've done that for you. And uh, like I said, we'll we'll fill in a ton more detail with future content. Definitely let us know if there's specific things that you're struggling with, and we'll do our best to address those. And uh, we should have a survey relatively soon so you can give us direct feedback if you want. It's not required, but we really appreciate it. You can't hurt our feelings, we just want to help. Um so feel free to be straight with us. Whatever your communication style is, we appreciate it. And if you're that kind of community investment, good karma type of person, then yeah, we appreciate you the most. Um and obviously we don't want to make things that aren't gonna help you. That's that's a complete waste of energy on all our parts. So that's a wrap on how to start your GRE studies in 2026. Uh my greatest hope is that this material is gonna make your process as easy and as painless as it can possibly be. If you want more tips and strategies for optimizing your performance on the GRE, just head to our website, thegre strategy.com, which will be linked in the description of this content. And we plan to make this a regular show. So if you like it, please subscribe. But at the very least, please just stay positive and stay consistent with your studies. It's really important that you become the person that you want to be, makes the world a much better place. And I'm really excited for you and everybody else to uh reap the benefits of all the effort that you're investing in this process. Talk to you soon.