I am researching the GRE as I write this and I found this website.
http://www.psywww.com/careers/gre.htm
Which is somewhat helpful. What are the average GRE scores? Like with the MCATs the average score is 27, what is the average GRE score?
Are the topics in the GRE covered in most undergrad coursework or does the GRE measure ‘common sense’ and the ability to read and respond to info coherently, which is independent of college coursework?
Wesley, the most helpful website I found when preparing was the actual GRE information site (found here)
There are three sections to the test: Verbal, Quantitative, and Analytical Writing.
Max score on Verbal and Quantitative are 800 (on each test, total of 1600). Max score on Analytical Writing is 6.
The verbal and quantitative are multiple choice, and the analytical is a two part writing response format.
There is some information about average scores on this site, too, along with test prep tips and products (I didn’t use any test prep stuff), and here is some information on average Alumni GRE scores for graduates of California State (chosen because it was at the top of the search list, you can get average GRE scores for just about any university if you sort through long enough)
Hope that helps and good luck!
FB
I took the GRE about 8 years ago, so I can tell you what it was like then. It may have changed, since then. The test is multiple choice, and divided into a general section and a subject specific section. The General GRE contained 3 sections, each scored from 200-800, like the SAT. The three sections were verbal (analogies and reading comprehension), math (basic algebra) and anylitical (logic). The math and verbal sections were pretty much identical to the SAT. The analytical section had questions like "Four people are at a party, Tom, Dick, Harry, and Bill. Each of them is wearing a hat. The colors of the hats are red, green,blue, and yellow. Given the following information:
what color hat is Bill wearing?
a. red
b. green
c. blue
d. yellow
or questions like:
“Bill believes that high taxes retard economic growth. Which statement, if true, would best support Bill’s position?”
a. Alabama, with a tax rate of 9% has a lower rate of growth than New York, with a tax rate of 12%
b. After Mississippi cut government spending by 3%, its economy improved
c. Vermont, with a tax rate of 10% has a higher rate of growth than New Hampshire, with a tax rate of 11%
d. After Alaska cut its tax rate from 6% to 5%, the economy improved
In addition to the General GRE, there are also subject GREs, which test you on specific information related to the subject tested on. I took the Political Science GRE, in which I had to identify authors of certain famous books in political science, describe political theories, and so on.
It’s fairly clear that the GRE has changed sometime since Captain Amazing took it. Since I took it 11 years ago, it’s obvious that my comments on the test per se would also be less useful than those of people who have taken it since the logic section was replaced by a writing section.
I have mixed feelings about this change. Certainly, there is a serious need for better writing skills at all educational levels above elementary. Consequently, I believe that the writing module is an important addition. OTOH, I can see considerable merit in testing analytical skills of students who aspire to graduate studies, regardless of which discipline they choose. Unfortunately, there are many graduate programs which cater to students whose performance on the GRE is … less than stellar. Such programs tell applicants that they do not require the test of applicants - and usually process grad admissions themselves, rather than using the admissions office.
With apologies for expressing opinion in GQ. I “just couldn’t help myself.”
<mount soapbox>
I feel that the GRE should include both the writing module and the logic module. And that no grad school applicants should be exempt from taking it. Further, I feel that both the SAT and ACT should require both essay writing and logic. It’s not as if preparatory stuff is not available in abundance. Given the skyrocketing cost of higher education, students today should be prepared to show that they merit their seats in the classroom. Back when I took the SAT, the only preparatory help available was a selection of previous exams that one ordered directly from ETS.
I can see how a person who did not apply him/herself at a previous level (whether h.s. or college) might, after having been out in the “cold, cruel” world for a while, realize that more education is neecessary in order to have an actual career, as opposed to a succession of boring and ill-paid jobs. There are things that the owner of a prevously lackluster college record can do to improve both their grad admissions chances, and also to improve their test-taking skills. If I were working in a university’s grad admissions department, or in a department’s grad program, I’d be counseling prospective students whose records were lacking to use the alternative methods.
I am fully aware that the ongoing changes in work environments will continue to require both more education and more technical/machine skills. Many, perhaps even most, of these jobs will perforce be held by people who aren’t dumb, but also who lack the desire to be intellectuals. Nerdiness and geekiness are not attributes of the majority of our student populations, nor are they essential to the capacity to do well as students, even graduate students. However, application to the task at hand is certainly necessary.
There is more in learing to write than having a large vocabulary and being a grammar geek. I am delighted to see that this is becoming more apparent to those who are involved in the education business.
</mount soapbox>
Sorry to sound so completely curmudgeonly. I didn’t even know all that was inside there. :o
I took the GRE in late 2000, and my sister took it in early 2004. Most of what’s been said here covers most of the OP, but I’ll just add a few points:
[ul]
[li] The Analytical section was still around when I took it, but it was changed to the Writing section very soon after. Judging by the mix of types of scores I was seeing when I served on a graduate admissions committee in early 2003, I would say it was changed around mid-2002.[/li][li] The Quantitative section is a joke. OK, maybe not quite a joke, but if anything it’s easier than the Quantitative section on the SAT; for one thing, trigonometry is tested on the SAT but not on the GRE.[/li][li] The Verbal section, on the other hand, is moderately harder than the corresponding section on the SAT.[/li][li] Many (if not most) GRE General (see next point) tests are administered using adaptive questioning, on a computer. In other words, you sit down in front of a computer, press start, and you’re given a question of medium difficulty. If you get it right, your next question will be harder; if you get it wrong, your next question will be easier. As a side effect of this, you’re given your score immediately after finishing; no six-week wait involved. (I assume this isn’t the case for the new Writing section.)[/li][li] There are also GRE Subject tests, as opposed to the GRE General test that the posts so far have been discussing. These test your knowledge on subjects such as Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, Mathematics, etc. If you intend to go to graduate school in one of these subjects they’re pretty much universally required, and the scores on the General test are pretty much ignored. (At least, that’s how it works in physics.) These tests are scored on a scale of 200-990.[/li][/ul]
As to the average score, you can find PDFs showing the rough score/percentile correspondence here and here. In particular, it looks like the median scores are 470 Verbal, 620 Quantitative, 4.5 Writing.
I forgot to add that I had taken the GRE in August of this year. I took it on computer, although they still offer the pencil/paper test, I think. I prefer the computer format, and getting verbal and quantitative scores immediately was nice. It took about two weeks for them to mail me my analytical writing scores.
Something to think about, also, since you must be pondering admission to grad school…Most programs around here allow you to take the GRE during your first semester of grad work, but until I had GRE scores attached to my file, I was only a conditional student. Conditional students are not eligible for financial aid :eek:
I don’t know if it works that way anywhere else, though. Arkansas is a weird state.
FB
You say this as if the GRE wasn’t a product.
The GRE (like any of these standardized tests) is put forward as a diagnostic by a single company and universities choose whether or not to use it in rating their students. The company sells the test. If a university believes it can decide that a given student is worth admitting without buying the company’s product, why should they have to buy it? If a university believes it can decide who to admit or not admit without buying the company’s product, why should they be forced to require it as an entrance examination?
To summarize the prep materials that I used for the GRE, the writing section is graded based almost entirely on the strength of the logical arguments you make. There’s a little emphasis on organizational skills, and almost none of the choice of vocabulary, sentence structures, etc… The writing prompts they give you are never difficult just so long as you are careful to make your arguments airtight. Otherwise the main tip I can give you is to study up on vocabulary, because they really pull out some tough words on the ananlogies and antonyms sections.
For the same reason that they require either SAT or ACT for undergraduate admission.
Please note that my comments do not apply to small, private institutions of higher education. They have far lower prof-to-student ratios. Effectively speaking, students can get as much help from faculty as they want. It’s an entirely different environment, for those who can afford it, or who can get scholarships.
However, in my experience WRT large colleges and universities, it is almost always the social science departments which choose to not require it, and without having some substitute (as frex music and art departments do; there being no equally effective way to evaluate a student’s talent for art or music except by art portfolio or music performance, which is frequently juried; no small matter, in either case)). The departments which do not require evidence of capacity to do the work required in a particular program do so by preempting grad admissions processing from the college/university-wide Admissions Office. I consider this to be something of a cheat, even though they do make alternate requirements (e.g., “you must take X courses, and get b-or-better grades in every one”). This is not the big deal it may appear to be. In grad school, one “C” gets you a warning. A second one puts you on academic suspension. So this still leads to a certain (noticeable) percentage of admissions that will never finish a graduate degree.
There are no college/university-wide penalties for this behavior that constitute sufficient sanction. The department, meantime, has managed to inflate both its student count and its percentage of paid credit hours (these are each components in the formula used by administration to determine how many faculty a department may have; this is also a reason why some departments which have intro courses that are required of most or all students set these intro courses for more credit hours than the average class, although there are sometimes fairly valid reasons (e.g., lab hours) for doing it. Nevertheless, there are other ways to accomplish the same goal, except that they are more likely to reduce the credit hour production. This is information which most students never learn until/unless they becom tenure-track faculty themselves, and it is either never noticed by lower level administration employees, or its significance not grasped. But there’s nobody in a position to punish me for letting this cat out of the bag.). 
So, you see, I believe it is the student who is being cheated. A better system, from the standpoint of the student’s long-term best interests, is to require the student to take (or retake) some classes as a “post-bachelor admission”. Those courses are averaged into the undergrad GPA (thus raising it), and also help the student to be more prepared (cramming doesn’t work that well for most people) for the GRE.
If you have been prepared educationally, and have the capacity to learn the material, it’s not a big deal to “pass” the GRE. Especially with so many different “helps” available.
As for the cost of the test, if you truly can’t afford it, there are ways to get it paid for you. Just like the ways that students unable to afford SAT or ACT can get those fees paid. So the cost of the test itself really isn’t an issue. The cost of the study materials? You can get used copies at pretty cheap prices from other students, if you look around. Or even get ripoff copies of the CDs.
Today any student who gets the prep books/CDs and studies assiduously for his/her SAT can get scores in the same range I did in 1961 (without studying). Of course, that score 43 years ago was good enough for me to be a Merit Scholarship Semi-Finalist (my grades weren’t consistent enough for me to make Finalist. My scores in 1961? Math, just under 700; English, somewhat over 700 What was the problem with my grades? My mother died just after school started for my 8th grade year. The school asked my father to get me some psych help, but (a) my father was born in 1906, when it was scandalous for a family to have someone with “mental” problems, and (b) in 1957, the pediatric psychiatrists said I was schizoid - adult therapists, all of them, at various years later on, agreed I was no such thing, but that was a little late; I’d had no therapy when I needed it most. Which is why I always urge people to get counseling for a kid who loses a member of their immediate family. Don’t punish the kid for not knowing how to cope with death {or divorce, for that matter}).
There shouldn’t be the amount of parents (and students) angsting, or politicians trying to come up with “fixes” for our “broken” educational system.
(Hint: It ain’t the system that’s broken. If it were, foreign students would not be able to blast through both tests and grad programs. It’s the parenting system that’s broken, because, once the economic system internalized married women working, it took only about a generation to go from “mom’s” (read: any second parent) wages being a plus that helped the family “get ahead” to being necessary for a decent standard of living. Kids today get their “parenting”, not from their parents (excluding the rare family which can afford to have a stay-at-home parent) but from school, TV, and daycare and after-school care. None of which is able - or even legally permitted - to discipline in any fashion. Children who are raised without consistent limits being imposed on them are not to blame for being compulsive consumers or for being “impossible”. It doesn’t make them any more fun to be around, nor does it substitute for the sense of social, etc., limits that proper parenting impart. But it does explain “My God, how did we get in this mess??”)
Total non sequitur. Let’s review the tape:
Now, would you care to answer the question I asked? Neither the SAT nor the ACT are universal requirements for all those entering college, but you say the GRE should be a universal requirement for everyone entering graduate school. Why?
If you’re looking to testify more than just a paragraph tangential to the thread, there’s a forum for that.
Calm down, Mathsochist. From my experience sitting on admissions committees, the reason one requires the SAT, ACT, or GRE is to be able to compare grades from different institutions. Suppose an applicant from Podunk State has a B+ average on his transcript, including a somewhat troublesome C+ in Introductory Electrodynamics; what, exactly, does that mean? Nobody on the admissions committee has ever heard of Podunk State, so it’s impossible to tell whether this is a substandard applicant or whether Podunk State has managed to avoid the grade inflation that has run rampant over the last twenty-odd years. Should we just reject the guy because he didn’t have the good fortune to go to a college that everyone has heard of, like Harvard or MIT?
In other words, having a standardized metric on which to judge applicants is useful, since it (a) avoids penalizing students who come from institutions that have managed to avoid grade inflation, and (b) avoids penalizing students whose parents couldn’t afford to send them to an elite private institution.
I’m not saying that the GRE should be used as an entrance exam — admissions committees know that it’s only a rough metric, and even ETS call a requirement of a minimum score for admission “an inappropriate use of scores.” But it’s better than the alternatives listed above.
Wesley Clark, I scored a 2200 on the GRE (800A/790Q/610V) and I’m as stupid as heck.
It depends on your occupation. Obviously on the Q section you want as close to 800 as possible if you’re gonna be in a tech field of any kind. In fact, a 800 IS desirable. I nearly took my GRE over again because I got only a 790. You should buy computer programs and drill yourself until you’re making a 800 4 out of 5 times at least.
A high score in analytical or writing section is desirable too. Again practice is good here. I read that the biggest factors in getting a high score is essay length. The scorers have only 2 minutes to review an essay, so be as clear and long-winded as possible.
For verbal just learn as many new words as you possibly can. 500 is a nice MINIMUM. I had 700 flashcards and only got a 610 in the end, despite having a 5 on my AP class test. If you’re in a liberal arts area you’re gonna need more than 610.
Hope that helps.
Sorry, I should’ve been more clear. If you’re going into a tech field you want as close to a 800 as possible in the Q section because it’s so brain-numbingly dumb, as other people have pointed out. My 790 was only in the 89% percentile out of ALL test-takers, including liberal arts people. That’s why I considered taking it over again.
You want as close to a perfect score in analytical no matter what field you’re entering.
The V part is the hardest. I got a 5 on my AP English examination, memorized all the vocabulary words in several GRE books, and still couldn’t manage more than a pathetic 610 due to lack of vocabulary. You should set a goal of 650 for tech fields and 750 for liberal arts fields. Which means you should be drowning yourself in vocabulary flashcards.
[/done for real]
What he said.
I’m on the side of the student. I did mention that my comments don’t apply to small, private institutions, and explained why. I was commenting on large public institutions, no more.
I didn’t say it shouldn’t be used. I asked for justification for strongarming all universities into using the test. If a given institution thinks it can make selections without the GRE (for a given student or at all), why should it be forced to require the test?
Again, tygerbryght said “I feel that … no grad school applicants should be exempt from taking [the GRE]” and has yet to respond to my rebuttal.
I said “What he said” because I didn’t think I could say it better. My additional “testimony” was deleted because you seemed to find my experience of the departmental offices of large departments at two universities for a total of more than ten years irrelevant. I (informally, and only when faculty of the proper discipline were unavailable, but with full knowledge of both my boss, the master’s program director and the department head) did the grad advising for the master’s program while the official advisor was on maternity leave where I first worked (and while I was an undergrad student myself; life experience does count for something, ya know). And for most of the seven years I was at the second university, I was the shoulder that both grad and undergrad students cried on. I guess it’s that motherly image.
Here’s what I clipped from that resp before clicking “submit”; I’m glad I saved it:
If that isn’t enough, too bad. I do not argue. Since my opinions are of no significance to any institution of higher education, you have no reason to fear them.
I didn’t say it was irrelevant. I disagree with the use of a universal quantifier. The negation of a universal is an existential. That is on the analytic writing section, isn’t it? Especially if you prize the analytic sections you should value a logical, accurate approach in your own writing.
Now this is a justification for the use of a universal. I still am not sure I agree, but the point is subtler and not mere logic now.
I don’t really feel sympathy for people getting in over their heads. My course into the ivory tower has been a series of trials by fire. If you can’t hack it, you fail: simple as that. If someone doesn’t know themselves well enough to know they can’t hack it (or to voluntarily take the GRE themselves as a diagnostic if it isn’t required by their prospective institution), it’s nobody’s fault but their own.