Help Me GRE Math Study During My Bus Commute
December 14, 2015 4:21 PM   Subscribe

I'm gearing up to study for the GRE, but I haven't done math in...10 years? I usually read on my Kindle on the 30 minute bus ride to and from work, so I was hoping that I could instead start using this time for math studies!

The bus is often standing room only so I was hoping for some recommendations for math-focused apps or GRE ebooks I could use on a Kindle or iPhone that would help me get back in the groove. I've started watching some of the Kahn Academy SAT videos while I'm at home, but I don't have enough data on my phone plan to watch videos for an hour each day on the bus.

Step-by-step instructions for figuring out the answers are pretty key, as I don't really remember anything from high school. I was never particularly good at math anyway. Ideally, I'd love to start using some kind of interactive type learning app that could help me keep track of what skills I've mastered and what still needs work. I have at least 6 months to study.

Any other GRE study advice is also welcome!
posted by forkisbetter to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
This was me too - I did accelerated math in middle school and quit taking math altogether after my Sophomore year of high school, and tested out of math in college. I was never really very good, and always found it stressful. When I took the GRE it'd been 10 years +.

I think what really helped was the back index section of a GRE Math test prep book - Barron's, I think. It really laid out math in a way I found understandable, and once I memorised the core formulas for common questions the whole workbook was easy. I didn't need to drill math problems - I just needed to actually understand core concepts that I hadn't really gotten the first time around.

I got nearly 700/800 - low for an engineer maybe, but high for the arts. If you want more specifics me mail me. You can do this. Good luck!!
posted by jrobin276 at 5:24 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Best answer: The most important thing for GRE math is knowing what you need to know and separating that from what you actually DON'T need to know. The quantitative GRE (NOT the math-subject GRE) is a very specific set of questions that work in a very specific way. It's also a timed test and so part of the problem-solving of it is understanding that if you can cancel out three wrong answers (which you may be able to do more quickly than calculating the right answer) that is an okay way of getting at the solution. for the multiple choice stuff. Because it's timed, it may be worth your while, depending on the score you need, to do fewer questions well than finish all the questions, so know what you need for where you're planning to go.

So, in general, you'll need to

- Take a real practice test under real timed conditions to see how far you have to go
- Limit studying to what is on the test (I used to teach for Princeton Review, they have some good test prep stuff as do a lot of other places)
- Learn how to "ballpark" and guestimate answers, especially things like square roots
- Learn how to turn a sentence into a math problem. So "35 is twelve percent of what number?" makes my brain freeze, but 35 = .12x is something I can manage. And that's just substituting the symbols for the parts of the sentence.

These handouts, even though they are out of date, can give you refreshers on some of the topics you'd need to know about so if something is a real problem area for you, they can help. One dumb example I always use. You know about right triangles a^2 + b^2 = c^2 right? Know the common ones. Everyone knows the 3:4:5 triangle. But not everyone knows the 5:12:13 triangle. So when they give you a triangle with a 15:36:x measurement and you have to solve for x many people start multiplying (and wasting time) but you're like "Oho, the answer is 39!" and move on. It's all bullshit like that.
posted by jessamyn at 6:21 PM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


Best answer: Among other things, I took the ETS's online practice tests+diagnostics and used a Kaplan GRE review book with more online tests. But the thing that made the single biggest difference for me was actually Magoosh's GMAT Math Flashcards (I was using the Android version but I'm sure they're the same content). I think it's very well suited to the kind of bus-ride review you're looking for.

As you see, it's for GMAT, so, very much heed Jessamyn's advice about not studying stuff you don't need to know! There are a few concepts for the GMAT that are not needed for GRE. But they're generally pretty obvious and you can ignore them. The nice thing about it is that apparently you can't use an onscreen calculator for GMAT, so Magoosh teaches a few simplification tricks that are useful also for GRE math to help avoid unnecessary calculations (along the lines of the 5:12:13 triangles Jessamyn mentions).
posted by xueexueg at 6:58 PM on December 14, 2015


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