The GRE is a standardized test, so it has very predictable types of questions for both verbal and quant. There are several important strategies you can learn to make your life easier on most questions. By "strategies", I mean things like pairing the choices on Sentence Equivalence questions and choosing numbers in quant. Time spent on improving these strategies will raise your score.

However, the typical person (maybe you?) tends to just scratch the surface of what it takes to master strategies, and by the time they take the test, it's unlikely they remember all of what they've learned. This is pretty easy to observe: take out a piece of paper, and write down all the quant, verbal, essay, and timing strategies you remember. I am going to guess you missed some stuff!

Let's think about a simple checklist for each strategy:

1. Where does it live? If you need to review the strategy, where can you do that?

2. Have you written down the strategy in your own words in terms of how and when to use it?

3. Have you practiced the strategy on at least several ETS questions? Where are those questions if you want to review how the strategy works?

4. Can you easily explain how the strategy works on those questions if someone asks? Hint: to test this, post a question in the forums and explain it as best you can, and ask for feedback.

5. Do you have a strategy mountain - i.e., a system to memorize strategies in which you verbally recite the details of each on a regular basis?

Everyone serious about their score should be doing all of the above. This is non-negotiable stuff.

Now, let's take a look at the ETS Verbal Practice book, 3rd edition. It's pretty obvious what strategies to use on Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion questions, so I'm going to give you a breakdown of all the RC questions in terms of their type. Your goal is to be able to answer the above 5 questions for any given RC question's strategy.

Primary purpose: pg. 16 #1, pg. 20 #2, pg. 24 #7, pg. 29 #7 (primary purpose of pgh), pg. 103 #11, pg. 134 #7, pg. 149 #9, pg. 164 #7

Detail questions (includes inference questions): pg. 16 #2, pg. 17 #4 and #5, pg. 19 #7, 8, and 9, pg. 21 #3, pg. 24 #8, 9, and 10, pg. 26 #1, pg. 27 #3 and 4, pg. 29 #8, pg. 102 #7, 8, and 9, pg. 103 #10, pg. 119 #7 and 8, pg. 120 #10, pg. 134 #9 and 10, pg. 136 #14 and 15, pg. 148 #7 and 8, pg. 149 #10, pg. 164 #8, pg. 165 #9 and 10, pg. 167 #14

Critical Reasoning (over-represented in this book; the real test only has one): pg. 17 #3, pg. 18 #6, pg. 20 #1, pg. 21 #4, pg. 22 #2, pg. 25 #11, pg. 30 #10, pg. 105 #15, pg. 118 #6, pg. 121 #15, pg. 151 #15

Function: pg. 22 #6, pg. 26 #2, pg. 27 #5, pg. 119 #9, pg. 134 #8, pg. 150 #11

Think Outside the Passage: pg. 28 #6 and 9

Word In Context: pg. 120 #10, pg. 167 #15

As you can see, the verbal book isn't adequate for drilling certain types of verbal questions - for additional practice, use the ETS Official Guide and the ETS Big Book. But this should give you a good start.

The Bottom Line

Since strategies work so well on certain questions, we need to devote time to making sure we master them. The good news is that there aren't all that many strategies to master. Whatever stage of GRE prep you're in, see if you can find anything else you can do to make it more likely you'll pull the right strategy tool from your toolbelt for each question on test day.