<p>I'm the mother of a rising college junior geology major. He's made two statements that have me wondering about the timing for taking the GRE. He say he wants to go to graduate school BUT wants to take a couple years off to work in the field (oil company?) before he does. My question is when should he take the GRE: his senior year in college or just before he applies to graduate school? I'm sure his advisor will tell him along the way, but I'm really curious.</p>
<p>The GRE scores are only valid for 5 years, so he wants to be sure that he doesn’t take them and then have to retake them when he’s ready to apply 5 years later. </p>
<p>I’ve been out of college a year and a half and I find it difficult to muster the discipline to sit and study/prepare for them. I wish I had done it the summer before or just after my senior year. I’m usually too tired after work, or it just doesn’t hold my interest long enough. I’m not in the “study mode” anymore. But everyone is different.</p>
<p>NovaLynnx, thanks very much for the information! I had no idea how long the tests would be valid, and I appreciate hearing your experience of being out of school and trying to contemplate studying for them now. </p>
<p>I’ll also urge him to get his letters of recommendation before he graduates, I understand many career services offices at colleges will hold the letters and then send them to the desired grad schools when you’re ready to apply. That would be better than coming back and trying to track down professors later.</p>
<p>I took the GRE exactly on the day before classes started my senior year. Also, I didn’t have two months to study for the test – I had two weeks, being too busy with summer school. The Princeton Review study guide was a life saver, as it focused on strategies on how to approach the problems, as opposed to just giving example after example. I made a halfway decent score, 720Q, 450W, 4.0AW, and I still made it into every Mechanical Engineering Masters program I applied to, including UC Davis, and Georgia Tech. If I had to do it all over again, I would do it the same way.</p>
<p>So, (and this goes for NovaLynnx as well) I would suggest going ahead and getting the GRE out of the way. It is only one component of the application, and I really don’t know how much a GRE score says about a grad school applicant. I’d say, only take it again if a resulting test score is in the 200-300 range, but otherwise, don’t sweat it.</p>
<p>^^ They recently changed the scoring systems (which I don’t yet fully understand since all of my reading was in the old scoring system). But now the scores are in the 100 range or so, I believe, but they still use percentiles.</p>
<p>Thanks both of you, very useful information.</p>
<p>The quant and verbal are out of 170 each. I took the GRE over Thanksgiving weekend, a few weeks before most deadlines (Dec 15th). I signed up a few months in advance so that I could make sure I was absolutely ready (I don’t believe in taking it more than once b/c of time and cost issues).</p>
<p>My own professors said that I should not waste my time studying: I’d do well on the math portion (which was actually easier than SAT math) and programs in my discipline (math) didn’t care about the verbal scores as long as they weren’t abysmally low. My friend in computer science got the same advice.</p>
<p>I am not convinced it really matters if a student takes the GRE in college or a few years out.</p>