Error Analysis for the GRE

GRE Quantitative · Axiom Academy

LESSON Error Analysis for the GRE Every wrong answer has a cause — sort your misses into the right bucket and you'll know exactly what to study next. 1. Every Miss Has a Cause — Sort It Watch four practice problems arrive one at a time. Each one didn't just "go wrong" — it went wrong for a specific reason , and that reason sends it into one of four bins. Naming the bin is the entire diagnostic act. Content gap — the rule or formula was never known 2. Careless Errors — Same Method, One Symbol Watch −3(x − 5) get distributed. Every step of the method is correct — but at the exact moment the negative crosses the second term, it can silently flip sign or vanish. The final answer is wrong even though the student "knew how." That's what makes a careless error different from a content gap: the method was never the problem. Dropping a negative when distributing, or when moving a term across the equals sign. Writing 150 when the answer is 1.5 because the question was stated in thousands. Solving for x and stopping, when the question actually asked for 2x + 1 . Slowing down and writing one more step catches nearly all of these before they reach the bubble sheet. Before bubbling any numeric answer, re-read the last sentence of the question stem. If it asks "what is the value of 2x + 1 ?", circle " 2x + 1 " so you don't accidentally stop at x . 3. The 2-Minute Protocol, Run on a Clock

This is the written version of the interactive lesson above. See the full GRE Quantitative course.