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Last Updated on November 10, 2023
Often people preparing for the GRE General Test to apply to graduate schools find that, even though they’re preparing diligently, their GRE scores are not increasing. In other words, they either aren’t getting results or have hit a “GRE score plateau.” If you’re experiencing such an issue, you may be wondering, “Why is my GRE score not improving?” Alternatively, you may be wondering what to do to avoid having such an experience.
If so, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, I’m going to discuss common causes of GRE score stagnation. I’ll also discuss what to do about them to get your score to increase.
Here are the topics we’ll cover:
- Cause #1: You Haven’t Studied GRE Fundamentals Sufficiently
- Cause #2: Your GRE Prep Hasn’t Involved Much More Than Learning Concepts and Strategies
- Cause #3: The Strategies You’re Using Aren’t Sophisticated
- Cause #4: The Way You’re Practicing for the GRE Isn’t Effective
- Cause #5: You Need to Become Better at Handling the Test Itself
- How Long Does It Take to Improve Your GRE Score?
- How Much Can You Realistically Raise Your GRE Score?
- Why Is My GRE Score So Low?
- In Summary: Why Is My GRE Score Not Improving?
- What’s Next?
Let’s begin by discussing how skipping study of fundamentals can cause your GRE score progress to stall.
Cause #1: You Haven’t Studied GRE Fundamentals Sufficiently
It’s easy to get the impression that a reasonable GRE study plan is simply to answer hundreds of GRE practice questions. For instance, often people research GRE test prep resources, learn about the Official Guides and Big Book, and decide to prepare by answering the practice questions found in those books.
However, that approach may get you only so far. People who use that approach often end up saying, “I’m not getting any better at GRE questions.”
The issue in such a case is typically that the person preparing has jumped into answering practice questions without studying concepts and strategies first. It’s true that the GRE isn’t primarily a test of knowledge. However, we do need to know some concepts and strategies to answer GRE questions. So, if you’re preparing but not raising your score, it could be that you haven’t learned enough fundamentals.
The Solution
The solution to not having a strong foundation of fundamentals is simply to study fundamentals. You may not need to cover all GRE topics in depth. However, what you can do is consider your practice performance to see where your strengths and weaknesses lie and at least cover your weaker areas.
Once you’ve identified your weak areas, work on them individually. For each topic, learn the fundamental concepts and strategies that you need for mastering the topic. Then, learn to apply what you’ve learned by doing practice questions.
TTP PRO TIP:
Review or learn concepts and strategies associated with a GRE topic before answering practice questions involving that topic.
Cause #2: Your GRE Prep Hasn’t Involved Much More Than Learning Concepts and Strategies
We’ve seen that your GRE progress can stall because you haven’t studied fundamentals sufficiently. On the flipside, your GRE score may not increase because you haven’t done much beyond learning concepts and strategies.
In many cases, we can pass a test mostly by acquiring knowledge. For instance, we can prepare for a test in basic statistics by learning some concepts and how they are applied. Then, we can expect to be able to answer the questions on the test by using what we’ve learned.
However, since the GRE is more a test of reasoning than a test of knowledge, to master the GRE, we have to do much more than learn concepts and strategies. We have to learn to apply those concepts and strategies in a variety of situations and become adept at executing to arrive at correct answers consistently. So, if your GRE score isn’t improving even though you’ve learned a lot, the issue may be that you haven’t done enough beyond attaining knowledge.
The Solution
If you think the reason your GRE score isn’t improving is that you haven’t done much beyond studying concepts and strategies, then the solution is to learn to apply what you’ve studied. The main thing you can do to learn to apply what you’ve studied is to practice, a lot. By practicing, you go from just knowing about the GRE to being skilled in playing the GRE game.
TTP PRO TIP:
To master the GRE, go beyond just learning concepts and strategies to learning to play the GRE game by practicing.
Cause #3: The Strategies You’re Using Aren’t Sophisticated
Another cause of GRE score plateaus is unsophisticated strategies. The use of unsophisticated strategies can be particularly problematic in GRE Verbal though can also hold down your Quant score.
The issue is that simplistic strategies can help you get easy questions correct but won’t work for answering harder questions. So, when you use simple, unsophisticated strategies, you can score only so high. You generally get easier questions correct, but your performance on harder questions is hit or miss.
For example, on the Verbal section, we can get many easy Text Completion questions correct by simply paying attention to keywords. However, the same approach won’t work for harder Text Completion questions. To get those correct and achieve a high Verbal score, you need to use a more sophisticated approach.
In general, if you find that you typically get easy questions correct but aren’t sure how to answer hard questions, then to get your GRE score to increase, you probably have to use more sophisticated approaches.
The Solution
To become more sophisticated in answering GRE questions, you can look for a GRE prep resource that provides sophisticated approaches. One such resource is the Target Test Prep GRE Course.
In addition, armed with the awareness that you probably have to be more sophisticated in how you answer questions, you can work on improving your approaches. To do so, consider practice questions carefully, and thoroughly analyze the logic of what is going on in them. Also, look for subtle differences between answer choices. Regardless of whether you’re dealing with Quantitative Comparison or Reading Comprehension questions, you’ll find that the more sophisticated you are in answering them, the more hard questions you get correct.
TTP PRO TIP:
To get hard GRE questions correct consistently, increase the sophistication of the way you think about the questions.
Cause #4: The Way You’re Practicing for the GRE Isn’t Effective
We’ve discussed how important to GRE success it is to become skilled in playing the GRE game by practicing. So, you likely won’t be surprised to hear that a common cause of GRE score plateaus is ineffective practice.
One reason your GRE practice may not be sufficiently effective is that you may not be practicing enough. It takes a lot of practice to master a GRE topic. So, doing only a handful of practice questions on each topic may result in your GRE math score not improving or your GRE Verbal score being stuck below your goal.
That said, a more common reason why GRE practice isn’t effective isn’t the number of practice questions you answer. It’s how you answer them. For example, it’s common for GRE students to answer all their practice questions timed. Then, after answering the questions, they go through explanations to learn how they should have answered the questions they missed. Such an approach may seem to make sense. However, the truth is that it’s not particularly effective.
The Solution
If the reason your GRE score isn’t improving is that your practice isn’t effective enough, you can solve the problem by practicing as follows:
- Practice one topic at a time.
- Start practicing a topic by doing easy questions involving the topic untimed. Keep doing easy questions until you’re achieving high accuracy, such as at least 90 percent correct in each practice set.
- Then, do the same thing with medium-difficulty questions involving the same topic. Practice untimed until you’re achieving high accuracy, such as 80 percent or more correct.
- Take a similar approach with hard questions involving the topic, answering them untimed until you achieve around 70 percent accuracy.
- Once you’re consistently achieving high accuracy in easy, medium, and hard questions involving the topic untimed, work on answering them faster until you’re answering them at test pace.
Notice the emphasis on practicing untimed until you achieve high accuracy. By practicing untimed, you give yourself time to learn to apply concepts and execute. That approach works much better for improving your score than doing questions timed and missing many.
TTP PRO TIP:
For best results from your GRE practice, practice a topic untimed until you achieve high accuracy.
Cause #5: You Need to Become Better at Handling the Test Itself
If your GRE preparation is going well overall, and you’re doing well on practice sets, but your score isn’t increasing, then you may need to become better at handling the test itself. The GRE exam has its own set of challenges, such as timing, the need to skip and return to or guess on questions, and test-day stress. So, you may need to focus on becoming better at handling those challenges to get your score to increase.
The Solution
To get better at handling the test itself, you can take GRE practice tests. In fact, it may be best to take both official ETS GRE practice tests and third-party practice tests. Even though third-party GRE practice tests may be somewhat different from the real GRE, they can still help you learn how to handle the test.
Each time you take a practice test, analyze your performance. Consider not only the questions you missed or got correct but also other aspects of your performance, such as timing and how well your skipping or guessing strategies worked. Address issues that caused you to miss questions, and determine how you can improve your performance. Then, take another test and repeat the process.
TTP PRO TIP:
To get better at handling the GRE test itself, take as many practice tests as necessary.
Now that you better understand the types of issues that cause GRE score plateaus and how to address them, let’s answer some common questions about GRE score improvement.
How Long Does It Take to Improve Your GRE Score?
How long it takes to improve your GRE score depends on your starting point and your score goal. So, there is no single answer to the question of how long it takes to improve your GRE score.
All the same, you probably want to know how long GRE students typically take to achieve their goals. There is not a lot of research on typical GRE study schedules. However, a reasonable estimate is that GRE students take around 120 to 300 hours to achieve relatively high score goals.
To learn more about how long you may need to achieve your score goal, check out this post on how long to study for the GRE.
How Much Can You Realistically Raise Your GRE Score?
The short answer to the question of how much you can realistically raise your GRE score is that, by continuing to prepare, you can increase your score as much as you want to.
Now, you may be interested in knowing how much GRE test-takers typically increase their scores. Preparing for around one to six months, GRE test-takers typically increase their scores by around 5 to 30 points.
Why Is My GRE Score So Low?
If your GRE score is low, you haven’t yet prepared enough to score higher. You can be sure that with effective preparation, your score will increase.
TTP PRO TIP:
Effective preparation works. So, if you’re not satisfied with your GRE score, you can improve it by finding and using effective methods of preparing.
Let’s now wrap up by summarizing what we’ve discussed.
In Summary: Why Is My GRE Score Not Improving?
If you find yourself saying, “My GRE score is not improving even though I’m preparing,” consider the following possible reasons:
- You haven’t studied GRE fundamentals sufficiently.
- Your GRE prep hasn’t involved much more than learning concepts and strategies.
- The GRE strategies you’re using aren’t sophisticated.
- The way you’re practicing for the GRE isn’t effective.
- You need to become better at handling the test itself.
What’s Next?
For more insights into how to master the GRE, you can read our post on improving your accuracy on the GRE and our post on how to get better at GRE Reading Comprehension.
