…and he says he blew it. Apparently (and I guess I’m showing my age here) they have these newfangled computer thingies that let the testakers get their scores immediately. He won’t tell us what he made, but says it’s bad. I know he sucks at math, and so do I- but I am very good at the verbal stuff, and have offered to help him with that part. He plans to take it again, and will let me help him with the verbal.
Any advice on what we can do to help him with the math part? He's always had a hard time grasping it, and I don'[t know whether a crash tutoring program would help. He's never done well with standardized tests.
Yeah, I was about to say, are you sure it was the math, and not the “analytical” section he had trouble with? Nothing on the math section is above 10th-grade level. Assuming he studied Algebra and Trigonomerty at some point, if anything he probably simply forgot stuff because he learned it so long ago (as opposed to not knowing it in the first place). I don’t think its unusual to have to re-memorize stuff like the “perfect” pythagorean triangles, multiplying and dividing by negatives, SohCahToa*, etc. On my GRE I had a question on multiplying polynomials… which I had last studied in the at age 13 in 8th grade. Good gravy! I was 22!
Now the anayltical section… that’s a bitch and for most people it takes a lot of practice. in order to do the questions in the time allotted. There are ways to quickly recognize certain “types” of questions which can speed things up. There are study guides and practice guides available.
*SohCahToa = Sine is equal to the opposite side over hypoteneuse, Cosine is adjacent side over hypoteneuse, Tangent is opposite side over adjacent side.
Confession time - I took an aptitude test today and blew the math portion. If I can’t get credit for my college diploma I am going to re-take it in three months, after cramming the basics.
I suck at math, I have always been a more verbal person. If he is like me, get him to brush up on all the basics. I forgot how to multiply and divide fractions fer crying out loud! It’s just because I am a long time out of school and haven’t had to do it unassisted no calculator) for a long time.
Get him to practice the basics, until it’s bleeding out his ears.
I’ve worked in standardized testing for the past 5 years.
The best way to prepare is to actually look at past copies of old GREs. When you’re doing the math review, pay careful attention to the types of problems that are on the test. Since it is a standardized tests, similar types of problems will tend to appear on subsequent versions of the tests. For example, if there is a mean, median, and mode question on one edition of the test, there is likely to be one on future tests. The wording of the question may change, it may be heights of the basketball team rather than test scores of students, but the type of question will be the same.
Also, look at boosting the scores on the other portions of the test. For the verbal, try to push that score up even higher to compensate for a lower math score. The vocabulary builder books which are used by high school students for the SAT can also be useful for other standardized tests. The more difficult words tend to be words which the student has been exposed to, but are not part of the student’s active vocabulary.
For the analytical, I think only continued practice will help. I’d purchase logic puzzle books and just try to work on them for an hour or so per day.
I took the GREs a few years ago, one of the first years they offered it in non-written form. I bought a test-prep book – don’t remember if it was Kaplan, ETS, or what. It helped a lot; just going through the motions was worth the money. There were 6 practice tests in the same format, which was enough to get used to it.
I seem to remember reading that they had ditched the analytical section, replacing it with a composition question. Is that right?
Now that I think about it more – I don’t think it was the GREs in which they replaced a section. It was the SATs, although I don’t remember which section they changed.
It was the GRE that lost the analytical section, although the SAT added an essay last year. I remember when the GRE switched from Verbal+Quantitative+Analytical to Verbal+Quantitiative+Composition, in 2002, since I was debating whether or not to take it before the switch. (I’m one of those logical types that actually liked the analytical section on the practice exam.)
The best advice I can give is to download the PowerPrep practice software from www.gre.org (search for ‘PowerPrep’) and take a few practice exams. Since the material is computer adaptive, it will change each time you take the exam, and behaves exactly like the official test software. It even gives you instant scoring for the verbal and quantitative sections.
I took the GRE on Tuesday and got 710 Verbal, 800 Math. Still waiting for the essay scores.
The powerprep software has a decent set of practise questions but, depending on how much time you have, you might want to try some paper based ones first but make sure to do them in order and to not go back over them. Then use the computer ones to get a sense of timing and figure out how to pace yourself.
However, because it’s an adaptive test, I found the actual test to be much harder than powerprep. Also, there were some “research” questions in there and there was one which I swear was undoable. It basically simplified down to comparing 98 sqrt(3) with 183 or something. I spent over 10 minutes on that one before giving up. Luckily, I work on math problems absurdly quickly so I still finished the test with plenty of time to spare.
Another thing to be aware of is that the essay section is partially marked on computer. This is not very widely known and it might be an advantage if you understand this. Theres actually quite a comprehensive bundle of documents on the ets website about the auto-marking including one that details essentially how people have beat it before in controlled testing. That was… interesting.
Also: What major is he thinking of applying to? The powerprep has statistical information broken down into majors and degree level. He might have actually done better than he thought.
I got high 700s on all three sections of the GRE, but I was stressed when I took it and was sure that I’d blown it. Not that it mattered – I never even applied to grad school.
I just took the GRE as well, and the 3 sections are verbal, quantitative and analytical writing.
I definitely had some work to do to refresh myself for the quantitative portion. It had been a long time since I had to care what we know about isoceles triangles!
The most helpful thing for me was working every single problem in the math review provided by the GRE. I checked out books from the library on geometry and college algebra so that if I really needed to review a concept I could look it up. I also did a couple practice GRE quantitative sections from review books and the PowerPrep.
Once I realized my verbal score was going to be solid regardless, I focused all of my studying on quantitative. Why gild the lily?
Also, this is an important point about the computerized GRE. Don’t miss any of the first 5 questions if at all possible. They determine whether you get harder or easier questions later on in the test. If you don’t get the hard questions, you really can’t rack up the points. So burn a little time on the first 5 questions if necessary. Also, answer all questions. There is no penalty for guessing, unlike some previous standardized tests. So if you have questions left at the 1-2 minute mark, click on through to answer each one. If you have time to read the question and guess only from the answers that seem likeliest, that helps your odds.
This is pretty painful when you’re actually taking the test. I swear by the time I got to the end they were asking things like “What is the square root of God?”
These study tips helped me improve my quantitative score by leaps and bounds over my first PowerPrep and by about 50 points over what I did straight out of undergrad.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I credit, to a large degree, the inordinate amount of time I spent on the SDMB for my high verbal scores. So kids, if your parents hassle you about all that time you spend online, just tell them your preparing for grad school :p.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, when I tood the General GRE in 2000 I bought one of the study books (I forget which one) with a computer test simulation and after glancing through it took two tests one evening; as I recall I got mid-upper 700s both times, and walked out of the test with a 730/760/800, so it seemed to be a pretty good indicator of performance. Be aware, though, that different schools and departments place different weight on the GRE; while some–especially in the hard sciences where you have to take a subject test–view the scores competatively, it appears that others give greater emphasis to different aspects of academic performance, so before panicking you might see what goes for the school he’s applying to.
Standardized test taking, and particularly progressive tests (as explained previously–the questions get successively easier or harder as you go along depending on how well you’ve done before) is a skill onto itself, seperate from a mastery of the knowledge areas. Most of the math questions, I found, could be answered by elimination of obviously wrong answers without actually working out the problem, and a few were lengthy enough to work out that you really had to have an intuitive grasp of the problem in order to answer it in a reasonable amount of time. Math tutoring might help, but I’d first try to study test-taking methodology so what math skills he already has don’t get bitched up by spending too much time trying to explicity solve problems.
If he feels he was in any way “not himself” when he took the test, I would strongly advice him to do it again.
I took the GRE back in 1999. I had studied all summer for it and felt like I was well prepared. On the morning of the exam, I made sure I left plenty of time (a whole two hours) to get to the place. I planned to eat breakfast right before I went into the test center so that I wouldn’t be hungry during it. Because they always tell you to eat breakfast, get to the place on time, etc.
The thing is, I was so nervous that I got lost on my way to the test center. I was so lost that I showed up an HOUR AND A HALF late! Mind you, I had left a two hour cushion, so you can imagine how lost and frantic I was. Worse than that, I didn’t have time to pick up breakfast. So when I showed up, I was a ball of frayed, hypoglycemic nerves.
I thought I was lucky the lady let me take the test, but turns out I wasn’t. Because I was so “not myself”, I did poorly on the exam. I didn’t know how bad I had done until I went back to school and told my mentor, a professor who wanted me to be his grad student. He shook his head and told me how crappy my score was. I was embarrassed and emotionally devastated. But then my mother persuaded me to take it again. My score went up more than 400 points, without any extra studying or preparation. It was so high my mentor didn’t believe it! (I decided I didn’t want a guy like that as my grad advisor…he had full faith that the low score was right but doubted the accuracy of the high score…why?).
Maybe he’ll see some improvement just by taking it again. If he’s too broke to pay for a second-go-round, offer to help him with it. I owe my mother my Ph.D because she was willing to fork over $100 that I didn’t have.
True, but if you had trouble with those math courses, as many people do, you’re going to have a hard time on the test. You will not finish, for one thing, and you’ll make mistakes on the answers that you do give. Practice does help, provided that the principles are understood. I don’t think there’s ever anything more advanced than simultaneous equations in two variables.
I’ve done the GRE twice in my life, about 15 years apart, and the second time I raised my math score by about 150 points. I don’t know if it was because I spent several evenings practicing simultaneous equations before the test, or because I had become much better in math generally over the years, because both things had happened.
I took the GRE three years ago when it still had an analytic section and was computer-based. I believe they replaced the analytic section with a writing section. I also heard they are switching back to paper and pencil soon.
I was stupid and studied only briefly the night before. My scores were roughly as follows:
Verbal: 600
Math: 800
Analytic: 400
I guess I should have studied for the analytic section. I couldn’t do them fast enough. In addition, I had two analytic sections; one was for research purposes. I didn’t finish the second one, and I believe that was the one they actually used to compute my score. By the time I took the second section, I was already pretty annoyed at the first. I was obsessed with getting all of them right, and the more you get right, the harder the questions become. I should have just gotten a couple wrong to make it easier so I could finish.
I also think the logic portion of my brain was overtrained for problems with underlying structure. When working on math proofs, you have contextual information to which you can apply your experience. I could say, “I should use induction here,” or “I should use the triangle inequality here.” The logic problems on the GRE basically require you to make deductions from a set of axioms with no discernable pattern. It is not so bad when they ask, “Which of the following five statements are true?” But when they ask, “Which of the following five statements could be true?”, I have to prove that four statements are false instead of just proving that one statement is true. Anyway, I wonder if they got rid of this section because of people like me who scored 800 on the math section and 400 on the analytic section. Usually proficiency in math and proficiency in logic are highly correlated. I think they still use these type of questions on the LSAT, though I fail to see how being skilled at such questions could be of any use to lawyers either.
My daughter took it today - but she closed the final screen before she really saw her score. She thinks it was 1500 or 1600.
She teaches LSAT classes for Princeton Review, and looked at their GRE verbal classes. They had a list of words which she studied - and they were a very good match for what was on the test. She took enough math sample tests to remember the stuff she forgot from high school, but she’s good in Math anyway. She just finished an economics degree from a highly mathematical department, so she knows the hard stuff.
I took mine 33 years ago right after we came back from seeing the Apollo 17 launch. I have no recollection of my score, but I got into grad school anyway.