Embarking on GRE preparation can be a daunting task, and finding the ideal course is crucial for a successful journey.
If you’re exploring options and considering the Achievable GRE prep course, you’re already on the right path.
This is a recent player in the GRE prep space, offering interesting solutions through tech.
In this Achievable GRE review, we will dive deep into key aspects of the affordable Achievable GRE, offering insights into its innovative features and analyzing its strengths and weaknesses.
Hopefully, our comprehensive overview empowers you to make an informed decision about which is the best GRE prep option to lead to the graduate school of your dreams.
Let’s get to it!
Summary Table
First things first, a quick summary of the Achievable GRE prep course, so you get an idea of the scope of offered features.
Achievable GRE | |
Price | $199 |
Access Period | 1 year |
Practice Exams | 24 exam sections (recycled questions) |
Practice Questions | Infinite Quant (generated from 200+ question templates) and 400+ Verbal |
Video Instruction | ✘ |
Live classes | ✘ |
Prep books | Yes |
Quizzes | Yes |
Mobile App | ✘ |
Free Trial | Yes |
Score-Improvement Guarantee | Yes |
7-day refund policy | Yes |
Achievable GRE Overview
Priced at just $199 for a full year of access, Achievable offers a cost-effective solution without the complexity of tiered packages, making your preparation straightforward and affordable.
Achievable GRE offers a unique blend of effective study materials, cutting-edge instructional methods, and personalized learning.
Its emphasis on an innovative algorithm for personalized study schedules sets it apart, ensuring that your GRE preparation aligns with your individual memorization needs.
Here’s a quick overview of the key features of the Achievable GRE course:
- 1 single fully self-paced prep package costing 199$
- 1 year of access
- Comprehensive online textbook
- 24+ full-length GRE practice exam sections
- Endless amount of GRE quantitative questions
- 400+ verbal reasoning and reading comprehension questions
- 250+ vocabulary words
- Instant essay grading
- Bonus GRE explainer videos on key topics
- Refund policy and 7+ score increase guarantee
Achievable GRE Review For 2024
Achievable Prep is one of the latest players in the test prep world, founded in 2016 by Tyler York, a Silicon Valley businessman, and Justin Pincar, a former Google software engineer.
The company was created to provide a platform that creates a personalized learning experience and a straightforward test preparation process with the help of science and technology.
Besides the GRE, Achievable also provides courses to other test, such as the ACT, SIE, and AMC.
As of September 22nd, 2023, the GRE test underwent a significant update, resulting in a reduction in its overall duration.
Previously spanning 3 hours and 45 minutes, the revised test now takes only 1 hour and 58 minutes.
This transformation includes a decrease in the number of questions across the Analytical, Verbal, and Quantitative sections, accompanied by the removal of the unscored section.
Test prep companies have been updating their content to reflect this change.
Let’s now take a closer look at the core components of the Achievable GRE course.
Course Method
What sets Achievable apart is its commitment to adaptive learning.
Rather than a static presentation of content, Achievable employs adaptive algorithms.
These algorithms, akin to having a personal tutor, analyze your progress, quiz responses, and other data to tailor your study program based on your strengths and weaknesses.
Achievable takes test prep science seriously.
After learning a topic, you’ll encounter related practice questions in later review quizzes. This strategic reinforcement helps you remember the material, aligning with proven best practices in standardized test preparation.
The adaptive technology dynamically adjusts your study plan.
It’s not just theoretical marketing – you’ll experience the system working in real-time, refining your plan based on performance.
It’s a really cool feature.
The Achievable course is fully online and self-paced, so it’s good for those students who prefer flexibility and don’t feel the need to have too much guidance.
The Achievable comprehensive curriculum covers all the GRE topics (Quantitative Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, and Analytical) through the central resource of the course: the digital textbook.
Digital Textbook
Unlike most online GRE prep courses, Achievable doesn’t offer video lessons. Considering the affordable price tag, this isn’t so surprising.
For some people who prefer written information, this may not be a problem at all, but for visual learners, this can be a real drawback.
Still, that are bonus GRE explainer videos on key topics, which help mitigate that gap a tiny bit.
Either way, the quality of the online textbook is something to be reckoned with.
Achievable has poured effort into creating a digital textbook that is not only comprehensive, covering everything you need, but also easy to understand.
The book has 89 chapters, is short (no more than 20 minutes), and easy to digest.
Once you read the chapter, you answer some practice questions and are assigned a review session.
Achievable’s GRE Prep textbook adopts a strategic approach to content delivery.
It doesn’t overwhelm you with unnecessary information but focuses on key concepts and strategies crucial for tackling the GRE.
We love that the book is written in an accessible language, eliminating the need for deciphering complex technical concepts.
The textbook is not sold in a paperback version though, which may be unfortunate for those who prefer more of an old-school type of learning.
Practice Questions
Achievable GRE practice questions are one area where Achievable’s GRE prep course impresses, especially when it comes to quantitative questions.
Achievable Prep offers an infinite amount of quantitative questions, which seems impossible, but it is not.
What they do is that their system generates millions of unique quizzes with randomized text and variables from over 200+ GRE quantitative question templates.
This helps students learn the core GRE concepts instead of simply recalling answers.
After answering a question, students can review a step-by-step walkthrough of the math and logic involved.
As you take the chapter quizzes, these questions will be added to your review queue.
Based on how well you do, Achievable’s adaptive learning engine will schedule these quizzes for repeat reviews in the future to ensure that the techniques come naturally to you on exam day.
Regarding the verbal practice problems, Achievable offers 200 hand-crafted GRE verbal reasoning questions.
It’s not a lot in our opinion, but still enough for a reasonable preparation.
These questions include all the types of questions you’ll see on the exam: reading comprehension, text completion, and sentence equivalence.
All in all, the practice problems offered by Achievable are quite good and the text and video explanations are sufficiently comprehensive, preparing you well for the actual exam.
Full-Length Practice Tests
When it comes to practice exams, we started by being a bit confused about their offering.
The Achievable GRE prep course doesn’t really offer full-length practice exams, but they offer full-length practice test sections.
You can take full-length quantitative reasoning, verbal, or analytical writing tests.
On their preview platform, they say that Achievable includes 29+ full-length GRE practice exam sections. This is not a number that you see on the homepage.
On Achievable’s homepage, it only refers to 10 full-length practice verbal reasoning exams.
We ended up asking them to clarify the information through their online chat platform and we were informed that they currently have 24 sections, as the numbers are continually updated.
Although the questions are similar to those of the real GRE, one disadvantage is that the GRE practice tests offered by Achievable recycle the verbal practice questions.
So if you have already gone through all of them, you will not get any new questions.
The explanations on the practice tests are also not as comprehensive as the ones in the textbook, which go into more detail and sometimes even add video content.
Still, the quality of the questions is good – comparable to the real GRE – and you get a score prediction at the end.
If you are looking for non-repeatable questions on practice tests and exam-like conditions, you may consider looking into other options.
Practice Material and Other Resources
Besides the question bank and practice tests, the Achievable Prep course also offers flashcard-like quizzes for vocabulary building, which includes 250 of the most commonly tested GRE words.
Achievable split these 250 words into 10 groups of 25 words each and spread them out between the other topics in this course.
According to Achievable, they don’t exactly use flashcards because they believe it is not an effective way to study.
So instead, they use memory-tracked vocabulary quizzes.
Their vocabulary quizzes are like flashcards, but they help you learn and review GRE vocabulary more smartly.
They individually track your personal mastery of every single word.
Based on how you’re doing and some complex algorithms, they schedule them for review at the optimal time in the future.
Another cool feature of the Achievable course that you won’t find in other test prep courses is the instant essay grading.
Achievable uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to instantly score your GRE analytical writing practice essays, similar to the scoring mechanisms used by the ETS.
They also offer hundreds of essay prompts to practice with.
Achievable also offers a few nice free resources that anyone can access.
It includes 16 short video lessons that explain a few key concepts and practice problems, official ETS material for download, and even a Podcast called GRE Snacks, with bite-sized GRE tactics and tricks.
These are great resources and we appreciate that they give them for free.
Live Classes & Tutoring
The Achievable GRE prep course doesn’t offer any live classes or private tutoring. This is expected considering the price tag.
There are other GRE prep courses that do offer these options, such as Kaplan or Manhattan Prep, but, as you can imagine, you have to be willing to pay a good amount of money for that.
Although the Achievable GRE prep course doesn’t include live classes, they do have on their Resources tab a category about GRE tutoring.
There you can find a directory of tutors and professional GRE tutoring services with different price tags (from $75/hour up to $800/hour).
These tutors are independent from Achievable and test takers can reach out to them directly.
User Experience & Interface
Achievable’s user interface is designed for simplicity and effectiveness.
We really like how modern and clean it looks, and the fact that it’s very user-friendly, making the learning process more enjoyable.
Whether you’re studying on a computer or a smartphone, the clean and responsive UX ensures a seamless experience.
The platform’s modern design includes progress charts that highlight your journey through the GRE prep course content and your current proficiency in each section.
There’s also a section with all your bookmarked content.
The intuitive dashboard provides a comprehensive overview, allowing you to easily track your progress and proficiency in each GRE learning objective throughout the program and assess your readiness for the exam.
• Mobile-Friendly
Achievable doesn’t have a mobile app that you can download.
But to be honest, that’s not much of a problem, because they created a a best-in-class mobile experience.
The interface is fully adapted for mobile devices, so you can access it normally using the web browser on your smartphone.
If you want a more app-like experience or just want to make it easier to access on mobile, Achievable recommends you add it as a “home screen app.”
We still think that a mobile app could be a nice offering to have, but in the end, it’s just a slight inconvenience.
Student Support
Students can communicate with Achievable through email, phone, and chat.
Besides that, students can use the “Community” function, a sort of forum where they can ask questions, start discussions, and comment on other people’s posts.
There’s a section specifically for the GRE, alongside other sections dedicated to career advice, site feedback, and social introductions.
Achievable instructors are very responsive, and they try to answer all of the students’ questions.
Pricing
The Achievable GRE pricing couldn’t be more straightforward, which is refreshing. There is only one prep course plan, and it costs 199$.
We like the simplicity of the offering, as it doesn’t leave you wondering if you choose the right option or not.
For just $199, you get a full year of access to Achievable’s GRE course.
No confusing tiered packages, and no hidden fees – just a flat rate for a comprehensive GRE preparation experience.
It’s a one-size-fits-all approach that caters to students looking to bump up their GRE scores.
• Free trial
You can sign up for free (no credit card needed) for a trial of the Achievable GRE program that allows you to take a look at the platform, and how everything is structured for an unlimited amount of time.
However, what you can do within the trial is very limited.
They have a very limited number of pages you can check, so you end up not really being able to try the quizzes, for example.
Still, it’s a great opportunity to take a look inside the course to see if it’s something that will be interesting for you.
Guarantees
• Score Increase Guarantee
Like other prep courses, Achievable also provides a score guarantee. If your GRE score doesn’t improve by at least 7 points, you get a full refund.
There are some requirements to be able to request a refund:
- You must have already taken the GRE before enrolling in Achievable’s GRE course
- Your “before score” must be valid according to ETS (specifically, within the past 5 years)
- You must submit your “before” GRE score within the first 7 days of purchasing Achievable GRE
- You must take the GRE within one month of using Achievable’s course
• Money-Back Policy
Besides the score guarantee, Achievable offers an unconditional 7-day money-back guarantee to their GRE test prep.
Achievable GRE Pros & Cons
It’s now time to weigh in on the pros and cons of Achievable’s GRE Prep Course.
– Affordable Price.
– Adaptive tech that takes learning personalization to another level.
– Unlimited quantitative questions similar to the actual GRE.
– AI-graded essays.
– Engaging textbook, with clear explanations.
– Fully adapted to mobile devices.
– Score increase guarantee.
– User-friendly interface with free resources integrated.
– No video lessons and no live classes.
– Practice test explanations were less comprehensive.
– No mobile app.
– Recycled questions on the full-length practice tests.
Verdict
Achievable may not be among the top best GRE prep courses, but it certainly has the potential to become even greater than what it already is.
Although the lack of video lessons can be disappointing for visual learners, the digital textbook at the core of the course is a powerful resource to prepare you for the GRE exam and help you get a good GRE score.
Their adaptive learning technology and memory science are ahead of many other competitors, creating a highly personalized study experience that adapts to your weaknesses and strengths.
While it would be nice if the practice tests had no recycled content, it’s still a great resource.
Overall, the Achievable GRE test prep is a solid choice for those who value adaptive technology and seek an affordable yet efficient study solution for the GRE.
The best GRE prep course will depend on your preferences and needs, so make sure to consider all the options available.
FAQs
Is Achievable test prep legit?
Yes, Achievable test prep is a legitimate platform, with many students who reported positive experiences with the course.
Is Achievable GRE prep worth it?
Yes, the Achievable GRE course is worth it, especially for those who prefer a self-paced, technology-driven approach to study and are comfortable without traditional video lessons.
Is Achievable test prep better than Kaplan?
It depends on personal preferences, study styles, and budget needs.
Kaplan is more comprehensive, offering video lessons, live classes, and high-quality material, but it is more expensive.
Achievable is more affordable, with a simpler offering, standing out for the adaptive technology.
