I am scheduled to take the GRE August 24th, and I’m getting nervous. I got the software and book and have been studying all summer (when I have time). I believe the score I need is a 450 on both sections. How hard is it to get this score?
Any unofficial tips that aren’t on the website or in the books?
Thanks,
Ellen
Well, the book I got to study for the Physics GRE was totally worthless. It was a differnt format, covered different subject areas, and had questions that were qualitatively orthogonal to the actual test. I imagine that the general GRE books are better because there’s a wider audience.
I didn’t prepare at all for the general test, because I didn’t figure it would be hard, nor would it matter as much as the physics. I thought it’d just be another standardized test like the ITEDs, ITBSs, PSATs, SATs, and ACTs. Yipe! It was pretty tough! I almost didn’t finish on time!
All I remember were the logic problems I got hung up on: “You’re taking twenty children to the amusement park. There are five roller coaster cars that will each hold four students. Anna will not sit with George. Hubert must sit in the same car with Jennifer. Randall must sit in the last car. . . . [and so on, and so on] . . .Who is sitting in the third car from the front?” My answer: “You’ll sit where I tell you to sit, or you can wait in the van while the other children and I ride the roller coaster!”
The ability to solve innane logic puzzles was the focus of my undergraduate education, and I’ve used those skills over and over again in graduate school. :rolleyes: Don’t bother studying, just get a subscription to Games magazine! (Okay, not really.)
The logic (“amalytical”) problems are tough if you are used to standard standardized tests. In order to do them properly, you MUST take a few minutes from your test-taking flow, and graph out the “given” relationships. This will help you solve the 4 or 5 following questions relatively quickly. For me, this was the psychologically (not academically) difficult part because my internal timer was ticking away as I drew pretty pictures on my scratch paper, and I was feeling internal pressure to rush the section.
Are you taking the paper test or the computer based test? You cannot change your answers on the computer test, which can be tough. If you’re taking the computer based test, you can buy a computer program that will run you through the general test in the same fomat. It’s really worth it, because the flow is very different from a paper-based test. Like any standardized test, it mainly measures how well you can take that test. So the more comfortable you are with the format, the better.
One annoying thing is that there were algebra problems on the GRE that I had covered in Junior High School. I had to kinda pull those out of my ass. (“Hang on… it’s coming back to me… I’m remembering how to multiply and divide polynomials… thanks Mrs. Chan from the 7th Grade!”
um… Know your perfect triangles (3,4,5 & 5,12,13 etc.) and all of your square roots and squares up to 15 or so… (I find the math part harder, can you tell?).
Don’t forget your lucky #2 pencils even if you take the computer test! They got you this far right!? I favor Dixon Ticonderoga, myself. 
Ask ALL of your questions BEFORE the Exam starts. Including asking the “considerate” person sitting in the desk behind you to PLEASE not kick your chair during the exam.
The jerk behind me kicked my chair throughout the ENTIRE exam. Unbelievably distracting and annoying. By the end of the exam, I was thinking some most “un-christian” thoughts.
Spent the remainder of the day very pissed off. It lingered into the next day.
The good news is that I still did very well on the GRE, but I’m sure my scores weren’t as high as they could have been.
Also, go to the bathroom during the break, even if you don’t need to. I spent most of the second half needing to pee.
Also, i did great on the logic/math stuff, but the vocab killed me, i got words that no one had ever heard of before, and everyone i told my score to afterwards was shocked considering the amount of time i spend reading books.
Now i still have to take the Biology GRE, so that will be my fun project this fall…
[haunted look]
I took the GRE in 1997. It’s not one of my favorite memories.
[/haunted look]
It’s not quite the same as the SAT. I thought of it as the SAT on steroids.
I did rather well on it, though, especially on the verbal portion, where I managed a ridiculously high score. The math was harder, since that’s never been my strong suit, and although I did well on the logic puzzles, they were maddening to work through.
All of the previous advice in this thread is good. I did prepare a little for test, and my recollection was that the Princeton Review had a very good prepbook…I would certainly recommend it. ETS also publishes GRE tests that are no longer in use…I took one of those as practice, simulating the time constraints, and it helped.
My advice: Do not underestimate this test. It was not written by nice people.
I’ve heard the subject tests are a bitch and a half. But I found the general test way easier than the SAT (the math was less complex, the vocabulary was simpler, and I’m used to logic problems.)
You should do fine if you’ve practiced all summer.
If any of the advice in the books doesn’t apply to you, don’t follow it. (In otherwords, don’t change your sleeping schedule the night before the test. If you’re not used to eating before 2pm, test morning is not the time to begin your good breakfast plan. Don’t eat a granola bar if you don’t like granola bars. Do what it takes for you to be as comfortable as possible - but if that means ignoring other people’s suggestions feel ok at ignoring them.)
I also found the GRE pretty easy, but I test well. I know I did better than on the SATs. Also, I kind of took it for fun, to prove to myself that I was probably about as intelligent as anyone going to grad school. Its been about 8 years since I took it. Only took the General test.
Two kind of obvious things:
Hmmm. Well, one sure-fire way to boost your verbal score is to add to your vocabulary. The GRE tends to use the same words over and over (they are not in the average person’s vocabulary, and provide good ways to trip you up with false assumed definitions, like “noisome”, so they keep using 'em). As you go through your practice tests, write down any words you don’t know the meaning of. Make flash cards and practice them between now and August 24th to make sure you know them all. You might have to study 30-40 of them, but on your test that may mean you’ll nail 2-3 questions that you would have missed otherwise. It’s worth it. It’s not like it’s wasted effort on the words that don’t turn up, either, because a better vocabulary is a bonus.
You might find that some algebra questions can be solved very easily by just substituting simple numbers in for “x” and “y”. Try it on your practice tests. Put “1” in for x and 2 in for y and solve, then sub x & y back into the answer and look for that among your response choices. It doesn’t work for everything, but it’s a fantastic shortcut on some things and as you practice you’ll get a feel for which ones you can try it with.
Learn the types of questions that they ask. It seems to me that the GRE has more than a few 3-4-5 triangle questions. Learn the types and the formulas for answering them. Your hardest task will then be to identify the types of question they are asking in the actual test.
I don’t remember my GRE too well, but I did get accepted to grad school so it must not have been that bad.
A few things. First, review your math. The math section isn’t hard…they’re not going to ask you calculus…mainly solve for X stuff and basic trig, but if you haven’t done it for a while, you might be out of the habit.
The analytical section has questions of a few types. One is the simple logic puzzle. Given that Mr. Smith always sits next to someone with the same initials he does, and men always sit next to women, we know that Mr. Smith is sitting next to A. Mr. Jones, B. Mrs. Williams, C. Ms. Spencer, or D. Mr. Samuels?
The other kind gives you a paragraph and you have to analyze it. For example:
“We need to reduce our production of nitrous oxide. The nation’s forests are important, and pollution is killing them.”
This argument would be weakened if it was found:
a. That in 1950, there were 10 million acres of forest, and now there are 5 million.
b. Nitrous oxide does not kill trees.
c. Nitrous oxide can cause cancer.
d. Carbon monoxide, which is a common pollutant, kills plants.
You have spent the ~15 bucks on one of those GRE books, right? Not the expensive one but the cheap one. I found that helped. Actually GRE for Dummies which is decently price was one of the better books. Study it for a few days. It will help with those pesky vocabulary, logic and math sections.
When I took it a year ago it was on the computer system, so be prepared to get your answer fast, check it, enter it, then move on. Don’t fret about it again even if you suddenly realized you goofed.
Remember NOT TO STUDY right before the test. Get a good night’s rest, eat a good breakfast, and relax. I know this is logical, but easily forgotten advice.
I want to second what Cranky said about the language part. When I studied for the GRE, I got one of those books that had a list of words they like to ask, and I made flash cards for all the ones I didn’t know and memorized them. It turned out that several of the ones I memorized were on the test and I did really well on that part.
For the math part, I think the best thing you can do is work as many sample problems as you can (and get an algebra book if necessary), and for the logic part, there really are game magazines full of those stupid puzzles (as Podkayne said) and you’d probably do pretty well if you did some of those and got used to them.
Has anybody taken the Biology subject tests (either the Cell & Molecular or the regular Biology one)? Was it any more in-depth than the stuff covered in freshman biology (for majors)? I would assume that it is, but I had heard not.
A few things to note:
There are three sections on the GRE, which two sections are you speaking of?
They discontinued the paper test in either 1999 or 2000, I believe.
Time to register to take the GRE myself now…
The general GRE is computer-based only now. I know that, because I took the freaking thing last April.
If I were you, I would practice, practice, practice using computer-based sample exams and prep materials. I made the mistake of thinking that, since I was good at the subject matter of the exam and had been using a computer for lots of different things since I was a freshman, that I’d have no problem with the exam’s format. Ha.
On the computerized exam, you don’t get to leaf through the entire section and pick and choose the problems you solve first. You have to deal with whatever problem the computer picks for you before you can move on. This can lead to some pretty major anxiety–almost downright panic, in my case–if you rely on being able to dictate the order in which you handle problems on standardized exams.
And, even if you’ve sat at computers for hours and hours at a shot, using the machine for everything from games to desktop publishing to word processing to graphics and database work, what you’ve done is nothing like the exam. That’s because you haven’t been staring at the computer without a break for hours at a shot while dealing with the kind of performance anxiety that tests like this often induce. The first section I took was the verbal. I didn’t do excellently, but I did well enough. By the time I got done with that, I had a whopping headache. I did worse on the second section, and by the time I was I hit the third section, I felt like my head was being split open with an axe, and my eyes were more strained than the peaches that go into baby food. I couldn’t concentrate at all. I did miserably.
Thus, according to the ETS, I am in the 98th percentile in verbal ability, somewhere between the 35th and 50th percentile in mathematical ability, and in the 15th–15th!–percentile in analytical ability. Ouch. I may not be Einstein, but I doubt the ETS is right in believing that a sack of potatoes with a lisp could run rings around me, logic-wise. Luckily for me, I had good recommendations and some research experience, and I had already started working with my advisor on the project I’m doing now.
I’ll probably retake the GRE at some point this year. I’ll make sure to practice the right way this time, if only to reduce my nervousness during the exam. My boyfriend, who made it through his doctorate in a field very different from mine (Spanish and Portuguese), claims that your GRE scores can determine your priority for getting an assistantship once you’re admitted. He credits his high GRE scores for having gotten very good financial support through grad school.
The biology subject exam is paper-based and much less stressful. If you’ve had a good freshman survey sequence for bioscience majors, you should do OK. A little review probably wouldn’t hurt, though. I took the exam cold and did–well, not incredibly, but well enough to ameliorate the effects of my crappy general exam scores a bit.
Good luck on the exam!
–Scribble.
I meant to say “mitigate” rather than “ameliorate.”
I must learn to preview and edit before I post.
Bad Scribble. Bad, bad Scribble.
It’s the Third WORD!
slinks out.
I’d like to chime in with the others on studying for the verbal-- this is something you CAN definitely do and it WILL help. Being a cheap-ass, I checked out one of the prep books from the public library, and realizing that studying for the math was going to be pointless for me (humanities student, so it didn’t matter that much-- brushed up on order of operations, geometry, and the quadratic equation-- on the general test it doesn’t go much past trig anyway) and the logic part would be a crap shoot, I wrote down every vocabulary word in the book (most common 10,000 that show up on the exam or something) that I didn’t know and learned them on the bus to work that fall. It worked-- I only missed like one or two questions on the verbal and kicked ass, ending up in 99th %ile, and I think I owe every grad school recruitment fellowship I’ve ever gotten to that-- they like to deny it, but I think the schools like numbers.
I took the paper version back in the day, and my extra section was math-- argh!
I took the Bio exam three years ago. I got an 880 (99+%), so listen up… 
The bio exam is GENERAL BIOLOGY. You will experience everything from molecular biology to Field ecology. You will be asked to analyze data and give interpretations for results in simulated experiments, and you may not know what the experimental techniques are! Don’t get bogged down in them, or panic - they want to see if you can interpret unfamiliar material.
The hardest thing about the exam is its breadth. You may have been an ecology major, yet you will be expected to know about molecular and cell biology or vice versa. I did well because I had a double major in zoology and chemistry, with extra classes in molecular techniques. Go back to your general bio text, turn to the first page in the index and go through it entry by entry. You should be able to at least feel somewhat familiar with everything in it.
Hope that helps,
MM