I'm a bread guy. If pressed, I might say sourdough bread is my favorite food. But not just any sourdough - I'm picky, like any aficionado. None of that supermarket stuff. If I'm getting bread, I'm going to a legit bakery or making it myself.

When I first started baking sourdough bread several years ago, I was following a recipe on the wonderful website The Perfect Loaf. I really liked the precision with which the instructions were laid out (as it happens, the guy who authors the site is a former engineer).

At first, despite following a bread recipe carefully, the finished product wasn't great. This was confusing. I didn't really know where I went wrong, or what to do differently next time. Fortunately, the website has extensive articles on the principles of sourdough: how the starter works, what temperature your dough should be at various stages, how the water content of the dough affects the fermentation and rise, and much more.

I admit - I was reluctant to read these articles. They were long, and somewhat technical, and I just wanted to bake some flippin' bread. But after enough mediocre results, I eventually gleaned enough information about the principles from those articles to improve my finished product.

In GRE prep, we see a really common dilemma. People want to do things, not endeavor to understand the principles behind those things. This is why study plans are so popular. They are the recipes of GRE prep. They do usually work pretty well if followed correctly. But they might not work for you as well as you need them to:

1. You may be too lazy, distracted, or in a rush to even follow the plan very well. I see many people only selectively follow the directions in a GRE study plan. This isn't good for obvious reasons.

2. Different people are capable of different things at different speeds. Even if you do the tasks in the plan precisely as laid out, the end result might not be what you want, simply because you learn at a different pace than the average person, or have poor study skills, or any number of other reasons.

3. If, after studying, you take the GRE and don't get the score you want, unless you understand the principles of scoring high, you probably won't know what to do next. This is an almost ubiquitous dilemma. The attempts at follow-up plans from people frequently betray an almost complete lack of understanding of the "why" behind tasks. They usually are almost wholly dependent on someone else to tell them what to do.

Fortunately, the Gregmat team has a lot of resources to help you understand the principles of GRE improvement, both in terms of study skills and the progression of the tasks that will bring you from low to high verbal and quant scores. Make sure you watch the "must see" videos, and it will be more likely that you can recover from a bad GRE bake and understand how to improve your score. And you'll understand how to adjust your study plan if you need to along the way.