Did the GRE calculator help you guys at all?

[Lion87]

I want to know if the calculator on the GRE was helpful for those who have taken the revised exam. I'm working on math GRE problems but I keep making careless errors in my calculations since I am rushing to answer them within a certain allotted time frame.

Edited September 3, 2011 by Lion87

[Rachel B]

Yes and no. Princeton Review explains it the best. The calculator is a liability and ETS will use it against you. They will give you long, drawn out calculations and they'll want you to use the calculator for in order waste time. Your best bet is to try and visually eliminate and then calculate. If you calculate every possible answer, I guarantee you will run out of time.

[bdon19]

I'm an English person, and personally I know I would have bombed that test without a calculator. I can remember how to figure out problems and use formulas, but I am HOPELESS at simple computation. I used the calculator way more than I probably should have, but I didn't really have any time issues. In two of the three sections (I got an extra research one) I ran out of time, but only on a single problem each time. I tried to strategize by going through and skipping the ones I knew would involve more complex computations or guessing and checking, leaving those for the end. Ultimately, I fared pretty well (my range was 680-780--not bad for an English major!).

[orst11]

The only time I used the calculator was to check answers. Trust me, this does save you time if you don't have to check every problem. I think throughout the whole test I used it 2 or 3 times given I can do math in my head and by hand a lot faster than most people. Now if there was some type of device to make the English portion easier I would have used it for half the questions, I still did fairly well though.

[SumaiyaR]

I was thinking if the calculator was helpful at all as well and am not using any for my calculations at the moment. However, I am already terrible with time (I couldn't finish in my first GRE take) and I am really hoping this time it's better. x_x

[Huckabees]

I'm an English-y person like bdon19, and while I didn't do as well on my quant section (that's an awesome score!), that had less to do with calculator use and more to do with sucking at math. For me the calculator was extremely helpful with doing basic calculations that would have taken me a lot longer to do manually. I really didn't use it much, come to think of it. Math concepts I'd neglected to study were what tripped me up...

[grekid]

Ditto. I second huckabees. The calculator was extremely helpful.

[resource]

I benefited from the calculator. Especially with things like comparing fractions and square roots. If I didn't know the "appropriate" way to find an answer, I used the calculator as a brute force approximation and did pretty well with it. The key is to know when and when not to use it. It can help speed up your computations, but if you use it for everything, it can also slow you down. At the minimum, you should continue to set everything up on your scratch paper -- it's easy to hit the wrong number and forget what you were calculating.