How Much Does Magoosh's GRE Course Cost?

As of December 10th, 2021, you can sign up for a one month plan for $119, or a six-month plan for $143. This is a lot less expensive than many big brand name courses: Kaplan and The Princeton Review, for instance, have courses that are hundreds of dollars more. 

But there's another cost involved in terms of your GRE prep: time. Since Magoosh takes hundreds of hours to fully complete, many students don't finish the program. And the opportunity cost is important to consider: every hour you spend on Magoosh is an hour you could have been using to work on and analyze official ETS questions, which are WAY more realistic and will therefore better prepare you for the actual GRE.

Why's Magoosh So Well-Known?

Ever heard of "the streetlight effect"? It's the psychological tendency to look for something where it's easiest to search - named for a joke in which a drunk is searching for his lost keys under a streetlight, since it's easier for him to look there than in the surrounding darkness.

Most people looking for GRE prep just end up buying something they find on the first page of Google or Amazon search results. Unfortunately, these people usually just go with that choice, and if it's not a good product, they only find out the hard way. Many companies' products that appear on the first page of Amazon or Google AREN'T very good, but some these companies have so much money that they can influence reviews and SEO more than the little guys.

If you're reading this article, you're one of the few people who are willing to put in a little more time and effort when looking for GRE prep material.

3 Things I Like About Magoosh

1. Their vocabulary app

Magoosh has a free GRE vocabulary app with about 1000 words, and it's a convenient way to study new vocab for the GRE. You don't have to buy their course to use it.

The app has a feature that makes you get the definition of a word right several times if you get it wrong the first time.

BTW, my vocab app is better than Magoosh's: mine has 400 more words plus funny cartoons and mnemonics just like the ones you're seeing on this page. Check it out!

2. The instructional quality of their videos is good

Chris Lele and Mike McGarry are experienced teachers, and their instruction is much better than that you'd get from many companies' instructors. They've been in the industry for a long time, and that's a good thing, since they've had the opportunity to learn lessons from their successes and failures (like any long-time tutor has).

3. The price

Magoosh is inexpensive compared to courses from companies like Kaplan and The Princeton Review. BTW, Kaplan and TPR are probably the best known test-prep brand names, but also are the worst in terms of quality, in my opinion.

4 Things I Don't Like About Magoosh

1. It's time-consuming

Since there are so many videos on Magoosh and since it takes so long to watch them all, there's a tremendous time investment involved. And even after you've watched the videos, you've still got to actually solve questions, which is where most skill-building actually happens. So even though Magoosh is inexpensive in terms of dollars, it's very expensive in terms of time.

2. Magoosh writes their own practice questions and tests

Third-party-written GRE questions, like Magoosh's, invariably don't play by the same rules the real GRE's will. This can make you develop bad habits, introduce confusion, and in general, prepare inadequately for the real test.

They may also drive you a little bit crazy! Magoosh verbal GRE questions can be extremely ambiguous, especially for reading comprehension inference questions; Magoosh math GRE questions are often unrealistically time-consuming and calculation-heavy, and don't offer the logical reasoning opportunities that ETS GRE questions do.

Magoosh does provide 1, 2, 3, and 6-month study plans, but they aren't very objective - all involve heavy use of their course's videos and questions and are obviously designed to get you to sign up for their course. 

I kind of feel bad for the people at Magoosh who created the study plans. They obviously had to recommend the Magoosh practice material since they work for the company, but their plans would be more effective if they just directed you to practice mostly with ETS's stuff.

3. The slick marketing. 

Magoosh has spent millions on marketing and advertising its products over the past 10 years, and was one of the first companies to market with GRE videos. This is one reason their brand name is so recognizable. 

However, a lot of online reviews are fake (for any product), and the bigger the company, the more it is able to create fake reviews. The real reviews tend to float to the top of the pile, since they're ranked higher by the algorithms of the sites they're on, so if you're reading reviews, make sure you dig down several pages, and see how many of those 5-star reviews sound like a real user of the product and how many just seem designed to make the product look as good as possible.

Also, Magoosh pays people to refer others to its videos by using affiliate marketing. Most of the popular GRE blogs and GRE course review websites I've seen have glowing "reviews" of Magoosh GRE... along with a discount code: if you use the code, the owner of the blog gets a commission. This is why the 99.9% of the reviews of Magoosh you will find on blogs are positive. Magoosh is actually the biggest money-maker for many of these sites, since its GRE course is relatively cheap and easier to get people to buy than, say, a $499 course.

But if someone is writing a "review" but making money if you click on their affiliate link or use their coupon code, then that "review" isn't worth a hill of beans.

Sad fact: Unfortunately, most "review" websites for any product are affiliate marketing sites, and it's hard to trust their reviews since their primary goal is to get you to buy anything through any of their links.

The GRE Prep Industry's Dirty Little Secret

Ever have a crappy teacher in high school or college? You probably noticed that everyone in that class and in your major knew about how bad they were. But online, it's different. Let's imagine you use a product like Magoosh for a couple of months, but it doesn't improve your score:

1. You might just blame yourself. After all, so much of what you've read about the product was glowingly positive. And the people in the videos seemed really helpful and intelligent, and you had all those practice materials to use. Plus, you may chalk it up to being "bad" at standardized tests. However, you might not realize that although the instructors WERE good and there WERE a lot of practice materials, the realism of those materials and the way the program was structured WASN'T very good. 

Magoosh directs you to watch math videos but then gives you practice covering concepts that HAVEN'T BEEN COVERED in the videos. This drives most people crazy. Interleaving concepts is smart pedagogy, but they have to be concepts you've already been introduced to!

2. You blame the product, but then just move on with your life. Most people don't write a negative review unless they're really pissed off, and most GRE products aren't terrible. So people end up in that zone where they didn't like the product but aren't motivated enough to, say, write a review. Plus, there's no easy place to review many GRE products, so it might feel futile.

What Is The Best Way To Prepare For The GRE?

Part of the reason I'm writing this review is to try to convince you that you can effectively prepare for the GRE by yourself without spending money on anything other than the official ETS GRE books.

My free 1, 2, 3, and 4 month GRE study plans are designed to show you exactly how to do that. They include all my materials recommendations and spell out your daily and weekly to-dos. 

But I get it - some of you want more guidance. The promise of buying a product that seems as though it will take care of all your GRE problems is really appealing. Unfortunately, Magoosh is not a complete solution - nor is any single GRE product - and the sooner you realize that, the better, so you can develop a study plan that actually covers everything you need.

P.S. A good supplement to my GRE study plans is my GRE math practice app.

My plans are the culmination of the lessons I've learned about effective GRE preparation over the past 13 years, and represent my best attempt to help people who are preparing for the GRE by themselves.

The Bottom Line

The time you spend on the front end regarding developing a smart GRE study plan will be well worth it in the long run. Don't give in to the tendency to make decisions too quickly when you're new to this stuff.

Good luck, and happy GRE studying! Reminder that we help people prepare for the GRE who are applying to graduate school, business school, and law school. We also specialize in GRE prep for LD / ADHD students as well as older and non-traditional students.

"As a skeptical customer, I considered several different test prep companies for quite some time as I began to prepare for the GRE. I had asked other people in my field (clinical psychology) what classes and materials they used to prepare as well as how that strategy worked for them. First, I tried Magoosh because it was the cheapest well-recognized company, but as someone who already scored pretty well on the GRE before seeking help, Magoosh did not improve my score at all. I had the gut feeling that Magoosh and Kaplan were just good at marketing and for that reason owned a monopoly over test prep. Later, I realized this feeling was well supported by the companies' fine print--both Magoosh and Kaplan require you to meet a rather ridiculous amount of criteria in order to qualify for the score increase guarantee. So, I rethought the kind of resources I should look to to prepare and decided to find more locally owned test prep companies so I could really get to the bottom of whether they were effective. I came across Vince Kotchian test prep and decided to give it a try based on the reviews I found that I actually felt I could trust (rather than some likely paid blog about how great Magoosh is). I took the class on GRE verbal reasoning with Vince and learned a lot of useful strategies to apply to each question type that I had not found elsewhere. His class teaches you the strategies to apply, and then it is your responsibility to practice and develop the skills that are outlined. A lot of my score improvement was my own work applying his strategies as well as others, but I believe Vince Kotchian test prep helped me more than any large scale test prep company would have. What's really outstanding about this test prep company is that the owner, Vince, isn't just about making money. When he sees that a student is a hard worker, he is willing to go to extra effort to help them. That is what really gives me more faith in this test prep company than any big-shot company." - Alexis Cruz