Eliminating GRE Test-Day Anxiety

Last Updated on April 24, 2023

Even the most well-prepared GRE student can expect to feel a little anxiety on test day. After all, the GRE can have a significant effect on your admission to graduate school. Nevertheless, too much GRE anxiety has the potential to cloud your focus and diminish your test-day performance.

If you are someone who tends to stress about your GRE score or feel anxious while taking the GRE, we have a number of simple and effective strategies to help you eliminate GRE test anxiety and perform at your best.

In this article, we’ll discuss the following topics:

• Symptoms of Test-Day Anxiety
• Anxiety and the Fight-or-Flight Response
• Strategy One: Be Prepared
• Strategy Two: Take All Official Practice Tests
• Strategy Three: Exposure Therapy
• Strategy Four: See Your Success
• Strategy Five: Reassess Hazardous Attitudes
• Strategy Six: Turn Anxiety Into Excitement
• Strategy Seven: Create a Personal Mantra
• Strategy Eight: Take a Deep Breath
• Strategy Nine: Hydrate
• Strategy Ten: Recognize and Limit Anxiety in Your Life
• Strategy Eleven: Abandon the Need for Perfection
• Strategy Twelve: Leverage the Compound Effect
• Strategy Thirteen: Separate Fact From Fiction
• Strategy Fourteen: Don’t Compare Yourself to Others
• Strategy Fifteen: Make a Plan B and a Plan C
• Strategy Sixteen: Get Busy Answering Questions!

First, let’s take a look at some typical signs of test-day anxiety.

Symptoms of Test-Day Anxiety

Test-day anxiety can affect the body and mind in many different ways. Some common symptoms include:

• Your heart rate is faster than usual.
• Your breathing is faster than usual.
• You feel lightheaded, faint, or dizzy.
• You’re sweating.
• You have dry mouth.
• You have cramps.
• You feel tense.
• Your concentration level is poor.
• Your mind feels blank while taking the test.
• Your thoughts are racing and unfocused.
• You’re worried about how you’re performing.
• You read and reread the questions, but you can’t seem to figure out what they’re asking.
• You reflect on the questions after the fact and know that you had the ability to correctly answer them, although you couldn’t solve them in the moment.

If you’ve experienced any of these symptoms while taking the GRE, taking a GRE practice exam, or thinking about your upcoming GRE, you likely were experiencing test anxiety. Specifically, your fight-or-flight response may have kicked in.

Anxiety and the Fight-or-Flight Response

A little anxiety is a normal physiological response to situations that may present danger and thus require a heightened state of alertness. Anxiety increases our awareness, processing skills, and visual and auditory sensations. However, as our level of anxiety increases, we can see a steep drop in higher-order thinking — the exact type of thinking necessary to perform well on the GRE. This drop in cognitive performance is due to the fight-or-flight response.

The fight-or-flight response physiologically prepares us to either fight a threat or flee from it. Pupils dilate to enhance our vision, digestion shuts off (no time to eat while running from a bear), glucose and stress-hormone levels rise to provide energy to our muscles, and blood travels from brain regions that focus on higher-level thought, readying the muscles, lungs, and heart for a physical confrontation.

This evolutionary adaptation came in very handy in the distant past, when frequent encounters with large animals or rival clans could be deadly, but the fight-or-flight response is often not appropriate in our modern lives. If you’ve ever been angry and snapped at someone only to quickly regret your outburst, your fight-or-flight response may be partially to blame. The fight-or-flight response is triggered in seconds, but its effects last well beyond the point at which a perceived threat has disappeared.

If your anxiety level is too high when taking the GRE, your fight-or-flight response could kick in and make it difficult to concentrate on the question in front of you. Blood is leaving part of your brain to be available to your muscles.

Unfortunately, you can’t reason through an algebra problem with your quadriceps. Those can help you land a roundhouse kick on an enemy, but they’re not very useful for setting up an equation.

Aside from, of course, mastering GRE content, a key way to earn your highest possible GRE score is to minimize exam-related stress and mitigate any anxiety that pops up on test day. Fortunately, there are plenty of practical, actionable strategies that any GRE student can follow to decrease test anxiety and earn a higher score.

TTP PRO TIP:

Realize that anxiety can be a double-edged sword. In small doses, it can make us sharp, but in large doses, it can paralyze our cognitive functioning.

Strategy One: Be Prepared

Consider a 40-question test on basic division and multiplication. Would taking that test make you very nervous? Most people are comfortable with basic calculations because they’ve been practicing division and multiplication for many years. Now, change those 40 math questions to ones involving roots and exponents, shaded regions, probability, and number properties, and suddenly people start to get nervous.

They know that they’re not as strong with those concepts. Their bodies know this, too, and their bodies are telling them that this test is a important one and they may not be prepared to handle the challenge. Sounds pretty stressful!

The most obvious yet overlooked strategy to combat GRE stress is — you guessed it — knowing the material like the back of your hand. In other words, prepare, prepare, prepare! After you’ve prepared enough, prepare some more. Prepare to the point that the material is no longer a source of stress.

Don’t just practice until you can get questions right; practice until you can’t get them wrong. Once you have the confidence of knowing that you are well-prepared for the GRE, rather than provoking anxiety, the test may actually become enjoyable for you. After all, you’ll be able to put all of your hard work to good use and show the GRE who’s boss!

TTP PRO TIP:

To overcome test anxiety, the single most obvious strategy is to prepare so well that you can handle any question that the test can throw at you.

Just as you must be as comfortable as possible with GRE content in order to reduce test-day anxiety, you must be comfortable with the experience of taking the GRE. Achieving such comfort requires practice.

Strategy Two: Take All Official Practice Tests

There is a saying in sports that “you won’t play any better than you practice.” In other words, if you take a casual approach to your training, you can’t expect to do well on game day. If a boxer builds great technique and stamina on the heavy bag but never gets in the ring to spar, how well can fight night go?

The same idea can be applied to the GRE. Some students do plenty of preparation with GRE material but fail to take enough practice tests before the real deal. This is a bankrupt strategy.

One of the best ways to reduce GRE stress is to take (and review) all four official ETS practice tests before your actual GRE. Doing so allows you to build familiarity and comfort with the GRE that you can’t get from simply completing problem sets or untimed practice.

When you take several full-length practice exams under realistic testing conditions, you desensitize yourself to the process of taking the GRE and, to a significant degree, make the real GRE feel like just another practice test.

A former GRE student of mine told me that his test center was so cold that he needed to wear his coat while taking his GRE. On top of that, he had slept poorly the night before.

Yet, as someone who began his GRE journey with little confidence in his test-taking skills and thus had taken all available practice exams, he realized that this day was not so different from others when he had woken up, eaten breakfast, and taken a practice GRE. So, in spite of issues that he might have responded to by becoming anxious, he maintained his composure and exceeded his score goal.

Of course, there are only so many practice exams you can take, and you want to ensure that you use GRE practice tests strategically, at the right point in your prep. Luckily, there are other things that you can do at any time to mentally prepare yourself for what it may be like to take the GRE.

Strategy Three: Exposure Therapy

Exposure therapy involves changing fear and anxiety responses by putting a person in a scenario that elicits those responses, so the person ultimately can become more comfortable. For example, someone who is afraid of heights would spend time in high places learning to manage that response.

Interestingly, simply visualizing being in a situation that triggers a fear response is enough to catalyze that response. So, you can learn to stay calm while taking the GRE by visualize yourself taking the GRE, feeling any anxious responses that arise, and practicing managing those feelings.

If you know that when you think of the exam, career-related pressures trigger worries and anxiety in you, you could imagine that you are taking the exam, feel that pressure, and practice acknowledging that feeling without letting it snowball into anxiety.

If you tend to agonize over how well you’re performing as you progress through GRE questions, distracting yourself by trying to figure out what certain questions “mean” about your score, you could imagine getting an easy question and wondering whether that is an indication that you didn’t correctly answer the previous question. How do you respond to that situation? How would you like to respond?

You can take this type of “soft” exposure therapy to a fairly sophisticated level, for instance, by looking at photographs of testing center interiors. A quick Google image search brings up many such photos.

How do you respond to seeing a test center? How would you like to respond? Imagine yourself there and practice managing your response. You could even drive to your test center a few times. During the drive, practice feeling energized, confident, and prepared to take your exam. Get yourself accustomed to handling the situations that typically provoke anxiety in you, until they no longer do.

As you practice this exposure therapy, don’t seek to repress your anxiety; rather, notice your response to stress and sit with those feelings until you calm down. Consider alternative ideas, for instance, that becoming anxious about your career doesn’t do you any good. Can you talk yourself out of becoming anxious? Essentially, yes, you can.

TTP PRO TIP:

Use exposure therapy to minimize the effects of stress-triggering venues, situations, or thoughts surrounding the GRE.

Let’s look at another type of visualization (perhaps the most important type) to reduce test anxiety: visualizing success.

Strategy Four: See Your Success

Many top professional athletes use visualization to gain a game-day edge. The human brain is an incredible machine, and we often underestimate the role that our patterns of thought play in our performance.

Your thoughts become your actions, and your actions become your outcomes. We know that preparation and practice are vital, but if you don’t believe in your capacity to succeed, you may sabotage yourself before you even have the opportunity to put your skills to the test.

You have a choice about what you think. If you believe that you can’t lose, you’re all but guaranteed to do your best. You must visualize yourself triumphing over the GRE, correctly answering questions on test day and earning a high score. You must see it and believe it.

Try visualizing your success for 15 minutes each day. If you’re new to this exercise and skeptical of it, you’re the person most in need of it. Visualization doesn’t have to be complicated; it can be as easy as sitting quietly for five minutes at a time, three times a day, and thinking positively. You could picture:

• Being happy and feeling positive during the exam.
• Being accurate and efficient during the exam.
• Recognizing and knowing how to solve all of the questions on your GRE.
• Small elves placing necessary GRE knowledge in your brain.
• Remembering all of the concepts and formulas you learn during the study process.
• Developing a deep mastery of GRE content.
• Writing your essays knowing that you’ve earned an impressive GRE score.
• Feeling amazing as you walk out of the test center with a fantastic GRE score.

Along the same lines, it’s important that you catch yourself when you start thinking negative thoughts about the GRE and your abilities, and that you transform those thoughts into positive ones. Let’s discuss how.

Strategy Five: Reassess Hazardous Attitudes

There is a Buddhist notion that any time we face a setback or difficulty, we’re hit with two arrows: The first arrow is the event itself, painful but unavoidable; the second arrow, however, is our negative reaction to the event, which doubles our suffering but is, in fact, our choice.

In other words, our attitude has the potential to make a tough situation even more difficult — if we let it. In light of that, you may not be surprised to learn that students who experience test anxiety tend to exhibit a broad range of harmful, negative thought patterns, which we will collectively refer to as “hazardous attitudes.” Common examples of hazardous attitudes include:

I’m just not a math person, so I can’t improve.

I’ll never be able to answer GRE questions fast enough.

The GRE is too difficult. I can’t possibly reach my goal score.

The GRE is dumb. Why must I waste my time studying for this exam?

I hate studying. It’s such a waste of time.

The content that I learn for the GRE won’t be useful to me in graduate school or in life.

I can’t remain focused or calm while taking the GRE.

Students who earn high scores on the GRE tend not to engage in this type of negative self-talk. Instead, they view the GRE dispassionately, even positively. They are optimistic, realistic, and rational regarding their current skill levels and score goals, and the time and energy required to improve their skills and reach their goals. Examples of their self-talk include:

Right now, I need to improve my math skills, but with time and hard work, I can improve them to a very high level.

Currently, I may not be fast at solving GRE questions, but I’ll get faster every day, and in time, I’ll be fast enough.

Sure, the GRE is difficult, but I’m up for the challenge. Worthwhile things in life don’t come to anyone without hard work.

The GRE is a valuable tool to help me earn a spot in a great graduate program. I’m not entitled to anything unless I’m willing to put in the effort to earn it.

While studying may not be as fun as drinking beers, I know that knowledge is power in today’s world, and having greater knowledge than my peers can provide me with a major competitive advantage.

The GRE tests logic, critical reasoning, data analysis, reading, writing, and vocabulary skills, all of which are crucial to success in graduate school and the professional world.

Yes, the GRE is a big deal, but there are many tactics that I can use to stay cool-headed, focused, and ready, both in my preparation and while taking the exam.

If you’ve ever engaged in negative self-talk, don’t worry; recognizing hazardous attitudes is the first step toward eliminating them. Pay close attention to your self-talk, and every time you catch yourself engaged in a hazardous attitude, stop and write it down on the left side of a page in a journal. Then, on the right side of the page, restate that attitude as a more productive one. For instance:

TTP PRO TIP:

Use a journal to record your hazardous attitudes/negative self-talk and write a positive rebuttal for each one.

Whenever you fall prey to hazardous attitudes, recognize what is happening and write a restatement in your journal. The more you perform this exercise, the more likely you are to start feeling greater positivity about the GRE, the study process, and your own abilities, and a more optimistic outlook will go a long way toward decreasing your anxiety.

Similarly, you can also transform anxiety into excitement. Let’s look at how.

Strategy Six: Turn Anxiety Into Excitement

Research by Harvard Business School Professor Alison Wood Brooks found that by simply getting excited about a stressful task, people can improve their performance on that task. According to Brooks, people often think that attempting to calm themselves down is the most effective way to enhance their performance under stress.

However, Brooks’ research uncovered something different: People performed stressful tasks better when they got excited in anticipation of the task rather than trying to calm down. Brooks states: “Individuals can reappraise anxiety as excitement using minimal strategies such as self-talk (e.g., saying ‘I am excited’ out loud) or simple messages (e.g., ‘get excited’), which lead them to feel more excited, adopt an opportunity mind-set (as opposed to a threat mind-set), and improve their subsequent performance.”

In one experiment, Brooks investigated how reappraising anxiety as excitement improved graduate students’ performance completing difficult math problems under strict time pressure. (Sound familiar?) Prior to solving the problems, one group of students said the phrase “try to remain calm” out loud, while another group said “try to get excited.” Brooks found that the students who said “try to get excited” performed significantly better than the other group.

In another experiment, University of Rochester Professor of Psychology Jeremy Jamieson studied college students preparing for the GRE. Jamieson divided the students into two groups, each of which took a practice GRE. Prior to the test, he told one group about new research indicating that stress could be helpful to exam performance.

Furthermore, he advised the students that if they started experiencing stress during the test, they should remind themselves that stress actually may be helping them. The control group received no such pep talk prior to the test.

Jamieson found that the group that received the pep talk scored higher on the practice GRE than the control group did. About one month later, both groups took the official GRE, and Jamieson reviewed their official score reports. He found that the group that had received the pep talk performed significantly better on the quant section of the GRE than the control group did.

If you’re feeling stressed about taking the GRE, it may help to tell yourself that what you’re feeling is actually excitement. Every time you sit down to practice solving GRE problems, try telling yourself, “I’m pumped about studying for the GRE,” or “I’m excited to master these GRE questions,” or “I’m excited to earn a great score on the GRE.” Find a mantra that motivates you and use that same mantra prior to taking your actual GRE. Then, if you start feeling stressed during your GRE, remind yourself that the stress is probably working in your favor by keeping you on your toes.

TTP PRO TIP:

Get excited about taking the GRE! Your score will thank you.

There are other mantras that you can use to cultivate a more positive attitude related to the GRE and re-center yourself during the test if you start to veer off track. Let’s look at a few possibilities.

Strategy Seven: Create a Personal Mantra

We know that positive affirmations can be a ready source of GRE test anxiety help. Create a mantra that inspires you and repeat it throughout each day, for instance: “Nothing can stop me from earning my goal score” or “I will crush the GRE in every way.” Keep repeating your mantra in your mind. In time, you’ll likely come to believe it.

If and when you feel anxiety rearing its head during your exam, tell yourself, “I am a master of GRE content. I am completely prepared.” Another, simpler mantra that can be very effective both during your GRE prep and during the actual exam is: “I can handle this.”

As soon as you feel your emotions getting away from you, repeat your mantra to help refocus your attention.

Another great way to re-center yourself and quell your anxious impulses is to practice controlled breathing.

Strategy Eight: Take a Deep Breath

We’ve already discussed that breathing faster than normal is a common symptom of test anxiety, so it’s no wonder that taking long, deep, full breaths can actually make you calmer. When your breathing is relaxed, the rest of your body follows suit.

As you deliver more oxygen to your brain through deep breathing, you reap the psychological benefits of a calmer system. Unsurprisingly, calm people tend to breathe this way without even realizing it. With that in mind, “fake it ‘til you make it” is worthwhile advice.

To put yourself in a calm state that is optimal for learning and problem-solving, whether you’re taking the actual GRE or a practice test, or just doing some concept review, take several breaths that reach down to your abdomen rather than stopping in your chest. This type of breathing is one of the simplest and most effective tricks for reducing anxiety.

There is another incredibly easy but important way to reduce your test-day anxiety: staying hydrated!

Strategy Nine: Hydrate

Studies have shown that even 1.5% dehydration can have a negative impact on a person’s mind and body, yet the sensation of thirst does not typically appear until a person is already 1% to 2% dehydrated. Dehydration can make tasks seem more difficult than they normally would, and even mild dehydration may cause tension and anxiety.

Staying fully hydrated helps keep you at peak performance and reduces physical stress. Luckily, the method for avoiding dehydration is simple: Drink some water before you take the GRE, and maybe drink some during breaks. Don’t drink so much that you’ll be uncomfortable during a 3 1/2-hour test, but make sure that you drink a sufficient amount to keep thirst and dry mouth at bay.

Staying fully hydrated helps keep you at peak performance and reduces physical stress.

Of course, if you want to reduce the likelihood that stress and anxiety will derail your GRE performance, recognizing and limiting anxiety in all areas of your life can help.

Strategy Ten: Recognize and Limit Anxiety in Your Life

If you’re someone who tends to get stressed and agitated throughout the day, if you let the small stuff ruffle your feathers, it’s going to be difficult to walk into the test center and be cool, because every day you’re training your body to be on edge.

Quite simply, if you get flustered by every gust of wind in your direction, you’re going to be blown off course. So, your strategy is to practice better managing stress each day. There are numerous books and courses that teach techniques for remaining calm under fire. Here are some ways you can hone this valuable skill:

• Develop the ability to be comfortable sitting in traffic, dealing with a delayed flight, or waiting in a long checkout line at the store. Getting flustered doesn’t get you to your destination any faster. Why bother being stressed? Be cool instead.
• Work to be more patient with the people around you. Your friend is late to meet you? Realize that getting rattled will only get in the way of having a good time. Your boss is being a jerk? Perfect; now is your chance to improve your people skills. Make it your goal to become your boss’s favorite person in the office. Take little annoyances such as these in stride and you’ll be better able to tackle bigger challenges. Make a conscious effort to keep your cool and you may actually help the situation.
• Be kind to yourself during your GRE prep. If you answer a question incorrectly, don’t agonize or put yourself down; use your mistakes as a learning experience. If studying for the GRE is taking longer than you planned, recognize that this process can be unpredictable and continue to do your best.
• Take stock of the advantages that you have in general, and realize that the problems stressing you out are probably minor compared to those you could face.

Now, none of us can expect to completely eradicate stress from our lives (nor would we want to, according to the research we discussed earlier), and similarly, we can’t expect perfection in our lives. When it comes to the GRE, seeking perfection can actually be damaging to your performance and a major source of anxiety.

Strategy Eleven: Abandon the Need for Perfection

We all wish everything could be done perfectly and done yesterday. Right. Now that we have that fact on the table, let’s get real: Nothing is done perfectly, and things often take longer than expected. Most things in life that are meaningful, such as earning an graduate degree from a top school, running the New York City Marathon, or raising children, are not easy. They can require a substantial investment of time and serious effort.

Students who strive for perfection view every question they answer incorrectly as an affront to their vision of how they should perform and how events are “supposed to” unfold, rather than as an opportunity to improve.

They see a question that they take longer than one and a half minutes to answer as a sign that they are not “where they need to be,” instead of seeing those questions as a natural part of the learning and growth that comes with studying for the GRE. When they take their first practice test and score, say, 315, they view this score as “25 points below 340,” instead of realizing that 315 is a solid starting score, that almost no students have to score 340 on the GRE to secure a place at a prestigious graduate school, and that only a handful of students are able to earn such a score even with intensive prep.

With each affront to the students’ perfectionist worldview, their anxiety grows, interfering with their GRE preparation and their test-day performance.

Such thinking is another key difference between students who experience test anxiety and those who don’t: The former feel the need to be perfect. Usually coupled with this drive for perfection is the desire to get things done as quickly as humanly possible. When preparing for the GRE, this is a lose-lose scenario.

TTP PRO TIP:

Do yourself a favor and don’t fall into the trap of believing that you or anyone else taking the GRE can and must achieve perfection.

As a corollary to jettisoning perfectionism, you would be wise to leverage what is known as the compound effect.

Strategy Twelve: Leverage the Compound Effect

The compound effect is the principle that continuous, incremental changes over time can produce dramatic results. For example, imagine if you cut your daily caloric intake by just 200 calories a day for six months? How many pounds would you lose? Imagine if you learned one phrase in a foreign language each day? How good would your conversational skills be after a year?

It’s important to apply this principle to your GRE prep. Sometimes students think that they have to study for four hours every day in order to make progress, so on days when they can’t devote four hours, they simply skip studying altogether.

These students are missing out on the compound effect. Moreover, their stress and anxiety about missing study days can spill over into test day.

Even if you can’t carve out as much GRE prep time each day as you’d like, by consistently studying a little every day, you can make big gains in your skills. Perhaps you work a demanding job and can study for only 30 minutes in the morning and an hour at night. Even so, if you consistently study for 90 minutes a day over the course of some months, you can develop a strong skill set.

Now that we’ve established that studying a little is always better than not studying at all, let’s discuss some other myths and misconceptions about the GRE.

Strategy Thirteen: Separate Fact From Fiction

Standardized tests tend to become sensationalized, so there is no shortage of false information about the GRE. Often, this false information fosters unwarranted anxiety in test-takers. Let’s compare some of the most common GRE falsehoods to the GRE reality:

Fiction: The GRE measures how good I am at taking standardized exams.
Fact: Each question on the GRE is designed to test a specific skill, concept, or piece of knowledge.

Fiction: GRE questions are based on an obscure body of information, and thus getting correct answers is predicated on my knowing the “tricks” that are needed to solve those questions.
Fact: The information tested on the GRE is extremely relevant to the success of graduate students and professionals in a variety of fields, and every GRE question has a logical, methodical solution. There are no secret “tricks” to getting correct answers.

Fiction: Since the GRE is a reasoning test, it doesn’t test content. Rather, it tests how well I think, and since I can’t really improve my thinking skills, I can’t really improve my score.
Fact: Yes, logical, analytical, and critical reasoning are major skills tested on the GRE. Regardless, you can learn to be a better thinker by mastering predictably tested content. There are many concrete concepts, facts, and thinking skills that you can learn, all of which will help you increase your GRE score.

Fiction: I have to correctly answer every question to earn a high score.
Fact: On a section-adaptive test such as the GRE, you can answer a number of questions incorrectly and still earn a high score.

Fiction: If I don’t correctly answer the first five questions of a section, I can’t possibly earn a high score.
Fact: The first five questions do not determine your score. All of the questions are important.

Fiction: If I’m not a fast worker, there is no way for me to earn a good GRE score.
Fact: GRE questions are designed to be solvable by well-prepared test-takers in the time provided.

Fiction: The verbal section of the GRE is biased in favor of native English speakers.
Fact: GRE verbal is equally accessible to test-takers regardless of their native language.

Fiction: When I take the GRE, I am “playing against the computer.”
Fact: The computer only facilitates the test and calculates your score. You are, in reality, competing against your peers. If you’re more skilled than they are, you’ll outscore them.

Fiction: If I don’t score 330+ on the GRE, I won’t get accepted to a competitive graduate program.
Fact: Although the GRE is a significant component of graduate school admissions, it’s only one facet of a student’s application. There have been many students who earned a 330 and didn’t get accepted HBS, for example. Likewise, there are many with sub-330 scores who earned a seat at HBS.

Fiction: I can’t benefit from my score report if I cancel my GRE score at the test center.
Fact: You can access and learn from your score report regardless of whether you cancel your score at the test center.

TTP PRO TIP:

Separate GRE fact from GRE fiction.

When you hear or read something about GRE, make sure that the information you’re getting is accurate. Otherwise, you could be setting yourself up for a lot of unnecessary anxiety.

Frequently, test-takers will hear tales of other people’s GRE success. Whether those stories are accurate or urban legend, you should resist the urge to compare yourself to others when preparing for the GRE.

Strategy Fourteen: Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

In preparing for a test as important as the GRE, it’s only natural to compare yourself to your peers. However, as Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” More to the point, comparison also has the potential to distract you from your GRE goals. Maybe your friend studied for just one month and earned a top score. Maybe your colleague earned a 335. Who cares! These people are not you. You can’t control anyone’s outcome but your own, so don’t waste your limited time and energy comparing yourself to anyone except the best version of yourself.

Feel free to ignore rumors of people who scored 330+ after one week of studying. First, you have no way of knowing whether these accounts are true. Second, even if the stories are true, those people are exceedingly rare. Would you compare yourself to Tiger Woods while playing golf? Doing so would make you feel inadequate no matter how good a golfer you became.

Feel free to ignore rumors of people who scored 330+ after one week of studying.

Comparing yourself to others is a recipe for GRE anxiety and a distraction. Focus on your personal goals. That said, it’s wise to have a backup plan (or two) in place, in the event that test day doesn’t turn out quite how you were hoping.

Strategy Fifteen: Make a Plan B and a Plan C

Consider a scenario in which you have one shot to take the GRE just before the round two deadlines. If you score high, you think you’ll get into one of your top-choice schools. If you don’t do well, you feel your chances of acceptance are slim. With so much pressure on a single test, how could you not be sweating?

You don’t want to create a do-or-die situation. You want to have a backup plan. Better yet, have two. Instead of the one-shot scenario above, if you didn’t hit your score goal, a solid Plan B would be to continue studying until you earned a competitive score, and reapply in the fall for round one. Furthermore, you could make a list of all the ways to enhance yourself both personally and professionally in the coming year. In doing this exercise, you might see that waiting to go to school is a very positive move.

We’ve learned that there are many ways to reduce GRE anxiety to optimal levels, but what if you use all of the strategies we’ve discussed and still find yourself becoming anxious while taking the actual GRE? Is it game over? Definitely not.

Strategy Sixteen: Get Busy Answering Questions!

The truth is, eliminating GRE anxiety entirely is pretty much impossible, and the idea that you have to do so can be debilitating because if you find yourself getting anxious during the test, you may conclude that you’ve already lost the game. Remember, eliminating all anxiety is not the goal. The goal is simply to deal with any anxiety that you do experience and not let it overwhelm you.

So, what should you do if you start to feel anxious during the actual GRE? First, don’t make being anxious a bigger deal than it actually is. As we’ve already learned, some degree of anxious alertness is probably beneficial. Moreover, reacting to anxiety by becoming anxious about the anxiety clearly won’t help. Instead, focus on the question in front of you so intensely that you forget to think about whether you’re anxious or calm. In other words, get busy answering questions!

Focusing on the question in front of you is a great test-taking strategy for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is that you will be too busy to make yourself more anxious.

Focusing on the question in front of you is a great test-taking strategy.

Whether you’re taking a practice exam or the real GRE, adopt this attitude: No matter what is going on, I am focused on getting the correct answer to the question in front of me.
Feeling tired? Focus on correctly answering the question in front of you. Temperature a bit too low in the test center?

Focus on correctly answering the question in front of you. Worried that you won’t be accepted to your first-choice graduate program? Focus on correctly answering the question in front of you. You can fall apart or pass out after the last question in the last section has been answered. While you are taking the test, focus on the question in front of you and nothing more.

Here is a surefire to help calm your pre-test nerves: Do some practice questions! If you can get into the habit of calming yourself by working on getting the right answers to questions, you are set. Make seeking correct answers to GRE questions your response to test anxiety, and that is what you will do when you are taking the actual exam.

TTP PRO TIP:

A key way to earn your highest possible GRE score is to minimize exam-related stress and mitigate any anxiety that pops up on test day.

Combat GRE test anxiety with these basic yet effective strategies, and before you know it, you’ll be cooler, calmer, and better prepared to beat the big exam!

Looking for more advice on how handle those last few days before your exam? Check out this article for other must-know GRE test-day tips.

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