Professional athletes review game tape to improve their performance. Students review professors’ notes on papers to get advice on how to better present arguments and ideas—and to improve their grades. Business people constantly review new strategies to determine how well they’re working.
What’s the common theme? No matter what you do, a major component of success is getting consistent feedback and using it to adjust your approach as you proceed. This rule applies to your advisee’s GRE studies as well.
For every hour that your advisees spend learning new material and doing new practice questions, they would be will-served by spending at least another hour reviewing material and questions that they have already completed.
Here’s how your advisees can best use that time:
- Create “Why I missed it” charts:
As your advisees review each question that was answered incorrectly, they need to identify what went wrong. Was it not knowing the right formula? Was it misidentifying what the question asked them to solve for? Making specific notes will allow you to see patterns that you can then use to focus your studying.
- See if there was a faster way to solve:
As your advisees review the explanations to every problem in a quiz or practice test, they should ask themselves: “Is the approach described in the explanation the one that I used?” If not, what “triggers” can be identified in that problem to remind them of the most efficient plan of attack the next time they see a similar problem? This is where the real benefits of consistent practice kick in: Every new problem that your advisees see will start to look like problems that they have done before and scores go up.
- Do a second round of review:
After your advisees go through a quiz or practice test once, they should come back to it after another week to see if they remember how to solve the problems that they answered incorrectly. It helps to see a problem a few times before one can instantly recall how to solve it, so make sure your advisees don’t shortchange themselves.
If your advisees incorporate these techniques into practice, it will help them focus their studies and will drive results. If your advisees review their quizzes and practice tests, they will improve!
