GRE Quant 101
Making the decision to apply for graduate school is often met with an initial jolt of excitement, followed suddenly by the realisation that to get there, you’ll need to start by tackling the GRE. Preparing for the GRE is a substantial task, and you shouldn’t have to go at it on your own.
We’ll start by walking you through the concepts you’ll need to know for the Quantitative Reasoning section, as well as the types of questions you should expect, common pitfalls students have found in the past and a few tips that will give you a great head start towards your target GRE score.
Concepts you should understand for Quantitative Reasoning
Before you start digging out your old linear algebra textbooks in a big frenzy, take a deep breath and remember that you learned most of the math you need to know for the GRE in high school. Here are a few concepts you should start with as you begin your GRE prep:
- Basic properties of shapes (triangles, circles, squares, quadrilaterals)
- Properties of integers
- Rate and probability
It’s common for students to focus their attention on mastering a certain question type or concept they’ve struggled with in the past. However, it’s important to start by reviewing all of these concepts before diving in to more specific test taking strategies, which we’ll cover later on in this article.
The types of questions you’ll face
The Quantitative Reasoning section is broken up into three question types: Problem Solving, Quantitative Comparison and Data Interpretation. Here’s what you should be prepared to know to answer each of these pieces:
- Problem Solving tests your understanding of common math concepts. This is where your knowledge of algebra, data analysis, arithmetic and geometry will especially come into play. These questions are fairly straightforward, multiple-choice questions that include five answer choices.
- Quantitative Comparison questions will present you with two statements and ask you to determine the relationship between them. While you’ll be able to answer these questions with the basic math skills we discussed earlier, the challenge will be to correctly identify which of the following choices is correct, which will truly test your understanding of all concepts:
- The quantity in Column A is greater.
- The quantity in Column B is greater.
- The two quantities are equal.
- The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.
- Data Interpretation questions will ask you to analyse one or two charts, graphs or tables and answer the corresponding multiple-choice questions. You should expect to see these questions in a split-screen format, with the graphs on one side and the question on the other. This format can be tricky, as the graphs will occasionally force the questions onto a second page, requiring you to scroll down to read all the answer choices.
Tricks to crack the trickiest quantitative reasoning elements
While the concepts you’ll need to know are fairly basic, Quantitative Reasoning questions are by no means a walk in the park. With the GRE being written to challenge test takers, your success will depend on your understanding of what you’re being asked on each question. Many students starting out will get lulled to sleep and rely on their knowledge of the basics, which can lead them to falling victim to selecting an answer choice that seems correct, but fails to address the entirety of the question.
Successful test takers often save time by estimating, rather than dealing with the unwieldy numbers provided on the GRE. For example, a quantitative reasoning question might look like this:
If Pam can run 3 miles in 25 minutes, approximately how many miles can she run in two hours?
Before you pull out your calculator, let’s look at the answer choices. Since Pam is already running 3 miles in 25 minutes, we can safely assume she’ll run many more than 8 miles in two hours, so answer choice A is out. We can also see that if she’s running 3 miles in 25 minutes, she’s averaging a little less than 7 miles in one hour. If we were to double that to answer the question, we quickly find that B is the correct answer. (For those who want to use a calculator, you would find that the exact answer is 14.4.)
Investing a significant amount of time to prepare for the GRE is advisable no matter what, but we hope that these starting points will help you skip past any unnecessary hurdles and quickly launch into the studies that will aid you best.