How to Improve Your GRE Score: Top 5 Tips

Whether your official GRE score is lower than your target score or you aren’t scoring as high as you were hoping on your practice tests, there are steps you can take to change up your prep routine and see your score climb. Here are our top 5 tips on what you can do to improve your GRE score.
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You’ve recognized that you’re not quite hitting your score goal, so it’s time to shift the way that you’ve been conducting your GRE prep. Take stock of everything you have been doing. The key here is to be honest with yourself in assessing your process so far. How many hours have you put in to your prep over what period of time? How many practice tests have you taken? How often are you studying? Are there distractions that you can eliminate to make your study sessions more productive?
The solution to raising your score may simply be to put in more legwork. If you’ve been studying once or twice a week, consider adding an additional day or two. If you’ve only been at it for a month, realize that most students see the greatest progress after 2-3 months of dedicated prep. Consider following our 3-month GRE Study Guide. 
Take steps to fine-tune the way you are approaching your GRE studying. For example, if you’re sitting down to study, but are getting texts and emails that interrupt your focus every fifteen minutes, consider putting your phone on Do Not Disturb or Airplane Mode so you can apply 2-3 hours of undivided attention during every session. 
Perhaps you need to supplement what you are doing with additional resources. If you’ve been studying on your own, consider working with a GRE expert teacher or tutor who can help you identify your greatest areas of opportunity. Kaplan has both Live Online and In Person GRE classes that will structure your prep and teach you proven strategies. For the most personalized experience, you can work with a private tutor who will get to know your personal strengths and weaknesses and structure your prep to serve your goals.

Once you’ve committed to improving your score, get organized. Choose your GRE test date if you haven’t already and work backward to plan your studying. Procrastination is tempting. If you don’t take the time to literally pencil in your GRE prep, you may find yourself consistently pushing it off and losing valuable time to do practice sets, review foundational material, or drill vocabulary words. Sit down and craft a study calendar—literally. Whether you are using a paper calendar, your computer, or your phone, schedule blocks of time several days each week up until your Test Day.
To add a layer of accountability and structure, be specific when crafting your study schedule, devoting each study day to a specific task. If you’re unsure of where to start, a GRE prep book can be helpful in giving you an overview of what’s tested on the GRE. Be sure to schedule a full-length GRE practice test every few weeks to build your stamina and experience with the structure of the test. 
Here’s an example of what one week in a 3-month study calendar might look like:


When you get a question wrong, there’s a small part of you that should get excited. When you make an error, you create a valuable opportunity to collect data to learn from your mistakes. To make the most of your errors, create an error log.
Your error log will serve as a central repository of all of the mistakes you make throughout your GRE prep. You can create this log in whatever manner serves you best—paper or digital. You’ll want to record the following data:

• The type of error you made: the question number and location (so you can find it again easily), the date, and how long you spent on the question.

• The error: describe the error you made in detail.

• The reason: Identify why the mistake happened: a gap in content knowledge, a misread question, a calculation error, or rushed work. Include careless errors in the log, too. Recording the specific cause—such as overlooking a negative sign or solving for the wrong variable—makes recurring problems easier to spot and address.

• The solution: figure out—and write down—what you can do to avoid making the same mistake again.

Simply engaging in the process of recording your errors as outlined above will help you avoid making similar mistakes in the future. To get the most out of your error log, take some time each week to review your log, paying attention to stubborn patterns and mistakes that you continue to make.

The Verbal Reasoning section has three question types—Text Completion, Sentence Equivalence, and Reading Comprehension. Students find Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions to be some of the toughest because they are heavily reliant on knowledge of vocabulary. Be sure to fold in GRE Vocabulary review at regular intervals into your prep schedule. We’ve compiled a list of the Top 52 GRE Vocabulary words that appear over and over again from one test administration to the next to help you get started.
As you tackle GRE practice sets, write down any word you encounter that you don’t know. They may be old fashioned, but flashcards are an excellent tool for studying GRE vocab. Create a flashcard for each word and drill it until you’ve embedded it into your memory.

The final tip to improve your GRE score is to take GRE practice tests on a regular basis. To get the most out of your practice tests, work to mimic the actual test-taking environment as closely as possible. Be sure to complete all of your practice tests in a single sitting using the timing restrictions of the real GRE. The more familiar you get with the structure of the GRE, the more efficient and comfortable you’ll be on Test Day—there won’t be any surprises and the practice of taking the GRE will be engrained in your body. Kaplan’s GRE Practice Test Packs give you access to up to 4 full-length GRE practice tests in a realistic test interface.

Why Can a GRE Practice Test Score Go Down?

A lower GRE practice test score does not necessarily mean that studying has been ineffective. One possible cause is a change in pacing: as students learn more, they may spend longer attempting familiar-looking questions they have not yet mastered. That extra time can lead to rushed answers later in the section.

A useful review looks beyond the total score. Students should check whether mistakes clustered near the end of a section, whether a few difficult questions consumed too much time, and whether accuracy improved in topics already studied. These patterns can help distinguish content gaps from problems with pacing or execution.

How to Review a GRE Practice Test for Score Improvement

Reviewing a GRE practice test means examining both accuracy and time spent. Correct answers can reveal opportunities to work more efficiently, while incorrect answers can identify concepts or habits that need attention.

Students can organize their review into four categories. “Within the planned time” and “longer than planned” refer to the student’s pacing strategy; different questions may require different amounts of time.

Question result	What to check	What to do next
Correct within the planned time	Was the answer based on a sound method, an educated guess, or luck?	Confirm the reasoning and record any effective strategy worth repeating.
Incorrect within the planned time	Was this a deliberate guess, a content gap, a misread question, or a calculation error?	Log the cause and practice the relevant concept or habit.
Correct but took longer than planned	Did the approach involve unnecessary steps?	Try another method, such as substituting numbers, working backward from answer choices, or organizing information in a diagram.
Incorrect and took longer than planned	Where did progress stop, and what made the question difficult?	Review the missing skill and identify when guessing and moving on would have protected time for other questions.

After reviewing the test, students should choose a few specific priorities for upcoming study sessions. These might include labeling units, checking what a question asks, or recognizing when an approach is no longer productive.

Targeted practice should come before another full-length test. Working through unfamiliar questions on the same topic helps confirm that a skill has improved, rather than simply testing recall of a previous solution. Untimed practice can strengthen understanding, followed by timed sets to practice applying the skill efficiently.

Progress is best evaluated across several practice tests taken under similar conditions. Overall scores matter, but topic-level accuracy and pacing can also show which study habits are working and where further practice is needed.

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