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25 Mar 2026, 20:00
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I have been studying for the GMAT for 3 months. My most recent mock test score is 555 (81Q, 79V, 73DI). My weakness is time management. My target score is 625+, and I plan to take the test at the end of April in order to apply for a master’s program in May.
I am considering switching to the GRE and have taken a diagnostic test: 157 Quant and 139 Verbal without preperation. I am not a native English speaker, so most of the vocabulary is new to me. But I feel I can manage GRE quant better with. My GRE target is 320+.
I have 1.5 months left to prepare. Should I stick with the GMAT or switch to the GRE? Which improvement is more doable: a 80+ point increase on the GMAT or a 25+ point increase on the GRE?
To be honest i already solved 4 sets quant in Official guide and they seem to be the same as knowledge and question types in my highschool which i managed well. And that made me think of switching.
I already registered one month plan of Gregmat and watch the first strategy of TC & SE which sound interesting and doable to me.
The thing is i only have around 1 month left so i am not sure if it is reasonable to switch to GRE and start from the beginning with vocab mountain or i stick with GMAT and try to improve Verbal and Quant
I am considering switching to the GRE and have taken a diagnostic test: 157 Quant and 139 Verbal without preperation. I am not a native English speaker, so most of the vocabulary is new to me. But I feel I can manage GRE quant better with. My GRE target is 320+.
I have 1.5 months left to prepare. Should I stick with the GMAT or switch to the GRE? Which improvement is more doable: a 80+ point increase on the GMAT or a 25+ point increase on the GRE?
To be honest i already solved 4 sets quant in Official guide and they seem to be the same as knowledge and question types in my highschool which i managed well. And that made me think of switching.
I already registered one month plan of Gregmat and watch the first strategy of TC & SE which sound interesting and doable to me.
The thing is i only have around 1 month left so i am not sure if it is reasonable to switch to GRE and start from the beginning with vocab mountain or i stick with GMAT and try to improve Verbal and Quant
26 Mar 2026, 02:50
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Hi nguyetthao0702,
With one month to go, you should avoid any switch. The improvement you are looking at on the GRE is not very easy to achieve. You are already on the GMAT path and should stick with it and do your best.
If you are feeling burnt-out, take a few days off. Getting rusty with concepts is common; most candidates need to revisit the conceptual matter; bring-in such 'consolidation phases' every now and then. Developing a cheat sheet for revisiting such concepts may help.
Weekends are a good time for taking mocks and analyzing them. So, make use of the weekends.
Advice, from a senior in your quest: Don't consider the prep a burden; it's a skill-enhancement opportunity. Make small sacrifices and work hard for a few weeks; the long-term dividends are totally worth it!
All the best!
Experts' Global
With one month to go, you should avoid any switch. The improvement you are looking at on the GRE is not very easy to achieve. You are already on the GMAT path and should stick with it and do your best.
If you are feeling burnt-out, take a few days off. Getting rusty with concepts is common; most candidates need to revisit the conceptual matter; bring-in such 'consolidation phases' every now and then. Developing a cheat sheet for revisiting such concepts may help.
Weekends are a good time for taking mocks and analyzing them. So, make use of the weekends.
Advice, from a senior in your quest: Don't consider the prep a burden; it's a skill-enhancement opportunity. Make small sacrifices and work hard for a few weeks; the long-term dividends are totally worth it!
All the best!
Experts' Global
nguyetthao0702
26 Mar 2026, 05:28
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nguyetthao0702
Hi nguyetthao0702,
Let me give you an honest breakdown, because this decision actually has a pretty clear answer once you look at the numbers.
The core question: which improvement is more realistic in ~1.5 months?
GMAT: 555 → 625+ is a 70-point jump. GRE: 296 → 320+ is a 24-point jump.
On the surface, 24 points sounds much easier. But the GRE number is misleading — and here's why.
The GRE Verbal problem
Your 157 Quant on the GRE is genuinely solid. The GMAT-to-GRE quant transition tends to be smooth for students with a strong math foundation, and your comfort with the OG quant material confirms that. That part of the switch makes sense on paper.
The problem is your 139 Verbal.
On the GRE's 130–170 scale, 139 is around the 6th percentile. To reach 320+, you'd likely need something in the range of 157–160 Verbal (assuming you push Quant to around 163–165, which is realistic). That means you'd need to gain roughly 18–21 Verbal points — without preparation, as a non-native speaker, in under six weeks.
GRE Verbal is uniquely vocabulary-driven. Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions — the exact TC and SE formats you've started studying on Gregmat — are built almost entirely on high-frequency academic vocabulary that native speakers often know from years of reading. For non-native speakers, there's no shortcut around building that vocabulary bank. Even with excellent strategy, those words have to be memorized and internalized before they become useful in questions. That process takes time — typically months, not weeks.
You mentioned that vocabulary feels like a "mountain." That instinct is correct. The TC/SE strategies you've been learning on Gregmat are real and useful, but strategy only works once you recognize the words. Right now, you're learning how to climb before you have the gear.
Why GMAT is actually the better path for you
Here's the case for staying:
You have three months of GMAT preparation already built. That's not a sunk cost, that's a real foundation. Your Verbal section score (79) is notably decent for a non-native speaker, and it shows you've been building real skill. GMAT Verbal doesn't test vocabulary the same way GRE does. It tests logical reasoning, argument structure, and reading comprehension — skills that respond faster to targeted practice.
Your weakest section is DI at 73, and your stated issue is time management. Both of those are addressable in a short-term push. DI timing specifically improves quickly once you nail the pacing strategies and practice under realistic conditions. That section alone can move your total score meaningfully if you've been underperforming it.
What 70 GMAT points in one month actually requires
I want to be honest: it's ambitious. It's not impossible, but it requires a very focused final month. Here's what that looks like in practice:
First, stop doing new content. At this stage, your problem is execution under time pressure, not knowledge gaps. New material won't help — targeted practice under exam conditions will.
Second, take a full-length official practice test this week if you haven't taken one recently. Review every question you got wrong and every question where you spent more than 2.5 minutes. The goal isn't to "study" — it's to diagnose exactly where your time is leaking.
Third, treat timing as a skill, not a constraint. The reason students lose time isn't usually that they're slow thinkers — it's that they stall on questions that are above their skill level and over-invest trying to salvage them. The correct strategy when a question feels wrong after 90 seconds is to make your best guess and move. Practicing this decision deliberately in timed sets trains the habit.
Fourth, build a weekly rhythm with two full mock exams. Take one on the weekend, do a thorough review, spend the week on targeted practice based on what you got wrong, then repeat. Two iterations of this before your end-of-April date is realistic.
The honest timeline check
If your score climbs toward 600–615 on your next practice test after a focused week, the 625 target is within range and you should proceed. If you're still stuck in the low-to-mid 500s after two weeks of this approach, the honest answer is to postpone your test by 4–6 weeks. A short delay for a higher score is almost always worth it for a Master's application — admissions committees care a lot about quant scores, and an extra month can make a real difference.
Don't let the April application deadline force you into a score that doesn't represent your ability.
On the Gregmat subscription
You've already started and you're enjoying it — that's not nothing. But I'd treat it as a sunk cost rather than a reason to commit to the GRE path. One month of Gregmat feels manageable right now because you're in the strategy phase. The vocabulary grind comes next, and that's where most non-native speakers find the GRE much harder than expected.
Bottom line
Stick with GMAT. Your GRE Verbal gap is the decisive factor — 139 to 157+ in six weeks as a non-native speaker is a steeper climb than 555 to 625 on an exam you've been preparing for three months. Your GMAT verbal is already functional. Your DI timing is the lever to pull.
If you want a structured resource for the final push, we offer a free 5-day GMAT trial at https://gmat.targettestprep.com/plans#s ... al-sign-up — no commitment, and the custom test builder and analytics are genuinely useful for targeted final-month prep. We also have a GRE trial at https://gre.targettestprep.com/plans#se ... al-sign-up if you want to explore that path, but given everything above, GMAT is where I'd put my energy.
You're closer than you think on the GMAT. The time management issue is real, but it's fixable — and fixing it doesn't require relearning anything, just retrained decision-making under pressure.
