GRE General — section-adaptive strategy
The second section's difficulty depends on the first, so front-load your accuracy.
The GRE is section-level adaptive: your performance on the first Verbal or Quant section sets the difficulty (and the score ceiling) of the second.
- Treat section 1 as the most important. Slow down slightly and check your work.
- There is no negative marking. Never leave a question blank.
- Quantitative comparison: if both quantities are fixed numbers, answer D ("cannot be determined") is impossible.
- Text completion: find the pivot word (although, because, yet), predict your own word, then match it to the choices.
- Use the on-screen calculator only for ugly arithmetic. Estimation is faster for comparisons.