Ever play "Telephone" when you were a kid? 

The way the game works is that the first person comes up with a phrase, perhaps a newspaper headline, and whispers it into the next person's ear. She, in turn, whispers what she heard into the following person's ear, until finally, the last person in the line says what he heard out loud, and then the first person reveals the original phrase. The funny part is what the last person heard and what the first person said are often much different, since any discrepancy caused by anyone in the chain mishearing part of the phrase was passed along.

In other words, you might have started out with "Huge Power Outage Affects Spain and Portugal" and ended up with "True Power Otter Infects Pain and Portable". LOL!

When you're learning GRE strategies for quant, verbal, the essay, or time management, you'll probably understand the video. You'll probably be able to do the practice questions in the video, and hopefully you'll deliberately practice the strategy on several if not many questions.

What you might not do is remember the strategy accurately over time. When your brain recalls the strategy, parts of it may be lost in translation, just like in the game of Telephone. This becomes pretty obvious sometimes when I ask one of my students to describe the steps of a particular strategy. Often, something has been mis-remembered, and the strategy has become mangled.

There's an easy way to avoid this: While watching a strategy video, take notes and create a written step-by-step procedure. For example, let's use the "variables-in-choices" quant strategy. I would write down something like:

Variables-in-Choices

Tip: can be used almost any time the answer choices have variables in them on multiple choice questions.

1. Invent numbers for the variables in the choices and write them down. Don't use 0 or 1 or a number you already see in the question.
2. Solve the problem numerically (i.e. by using those numbers).
3. Plug your invented numbers into each answer choice to see which makes your answer in step two.

Now, you are ready to drill the strategy. But since you might go for fairly long periods of time without practicing it, create a strategy mountain. Since there aren't that many strategies, you can probably make it a strategy hill.

• Step 1: make a flashcard for each strategy, with the name of the strategy on one side, and the step-by-step procedure for using it on the other
• Step 2: Just like you would the vocab or quant mountain, go through your strategy mountain daily, verbally saying the steps for each strategy out loud to see if you remember them.
• Step 3: If you forget a strategy, do 20 pushups and then make sure you drill it, either on a GRE question or on the quiz in the video for that strategy. 

Of course, this is important to do for every part of the GRE: verbal, quant, the essay, and time management strategies. You must be able to quickly recall these and prove to yourself you can do so over time. You can use spaced repetition to gradually increase the time between reviews of a particular strategy to make this more efficient.

The Bottom Line

Since there are quite a few strategies you'll need to master to score high on the GRE, and since you won't use them all every day or even every week, it's a great idea to develop a memorization system - i.e., a "Strategy Mountain", to make sure all the strategies you've learned are clear and at your fingertips on test day.