I’m not sure about the subject tests, but they vary from discipline to discipline. I have heard, however, that the English literature test is much like being anally raped with a cactus covered in tobasco sauce; it’s such a wide subject that it’s difficult to know a large portion of what they might test you on. Biology/Geology/other hard sciences shouldn’t be as bad, as they’ve got more concrete boundaries.
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I actually wanted to piggyback on this thread, as I am thinking about going to grad school for English, although I’m in the very early stages of deciding whether I want to do this (as in, I don’t even know if I would go for an MA or an MFA yet). Do schools generally require you to take the regular GRE plus your specific subject area, or can you just take the subject test?
And yeah, I took a practice “Literature in English” GRE test last night, just to see where I am, and it’s a bitch - I love what I do, and love literature, and am very well read, and am in general very good at taking standardized tests - but still, holy shit. Just as an example, they had a passage from “Gawain and the Green Knight” on the practice test, which was (probably) written in the 1300s, and which I have actually read, and know the plot of, and have even read in middle english – but they reprinted it, apparently, in old english, complete with symbols for the “th” sound, and I was only able to understand maybe half the words in the passage. It was so flippin’ frustrating – I know that poem, and I can read middle english passably well, and this was so far beyond my ability that I couldn’t even figure out where in the poem it was from. I will definitely be doing more studying if I do decide to go to grad school.
[QUOTE=iftheresaway]
Do schools generally require you to take the regular GRE plus your specific subject area, or can you just take the subject test?
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It varies by school and field. In my field (computer science), very few of the top schools require the subject GRE. But almost every math department will want you to take the math test.
It’s been a long time since I did it, but my local library had books with practice tests. They were marked “do not loan out,” you had to use them in the library itself, due to the high demand they’d be in specially around test time.
I was looking at twelve schools (finally applied to 4) and only 2 required the specific test; my field was Chemistry.
For the language part, something that helped me a lot was that, as part of Spanish classes, we’d done a lot of work learning word roots. Since the people who prepare that test love pulling huge neologisms with Latin and Greek roots, there were many words I’d never even seen before - but which I understood because I knew their roots. I don’t suggest signing up for Greek lessons, just remembering that “homo” means “pertaining to humanity” in Latin and “same” in Greek, “logos” is “knowledge”… Often there was only one possible answer even if I only knew one of the roots of that possible answer.
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As far as applying to grad school, I got my undergrad degree from the same department I will be applying to and the professor I want to work under is also the department chair, so at least I have that going for me. I did already talk to her about being one of her students [for Structural Geology] and she is cool with it. The faculty in the department knows me and what I am capable of, so even if my score is a little low I should [probably] be okay and the department seems to be the ones who have the final say.
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I’m sure you have nothing to worry about, but I suppose technically it’s the University who has the final say. As those of us who’ve been through this know, the department or professional school recommends to the University that they admit you. I wonder if anyone has ever been denied admission by the institution against a departmental recommendation of admission.