<p>I'm a junior right now and I was wondering what GRE subject test I should take. Biology or the Biochem, Mole bio, etc one. I am interested in genetics. </p>
<p>Do grad schools care which one you take (eg when they say they strongly recommend it)</p>
<p>Grad schools dont care which one you take (that I've heard of atleast, and I've done just fine having taken the Biology one). I found that the biology one was much easier, but that may be my background and lack of serious biochem or organic chemistry classes. Take whichever one that you think you can score over the 70% mark on.</p>
<p>In my opinion, the field of genetics is not well-served by either biology subject test. The biochem subject test contains more questions on genetics, and a larger percentage of them are quantitative (e.g., develop a four-gene linkage map from a table of recombination frequencies and give the distance from A to D in centimorgans). The biology test covers essentially the same topics, but has about half as many questions on genetics (17% vs. 36%), almost none of which involve math.</p>
<p>The biology subject test is also easier. <em>thumbs up</em> Grad schools probably don't care which one you take, but I bet they will take the relative difficulty of each exam into consideration.</p>
<p>Given that you will probably ace the genetics/mol. bio. section on either test, I would choose which test to take based on what else you know or wouldn't mind learning. If you've had a lot of organismal biology, or if you enjoy that subject, the biology test would be easier to study for. If you can't picture yourself eating, sleeping, and dreaming Stryer's Biochemistry for a few weeks this summer, then I don't recommend the biochem test.</p>
<p>Graduate schools don't care which one you take (and many don't particularly care if you take it at all). The biology test has better prep materials and is easier to study for, in my opinion, unless you have already memorized all of the steps of the Krebs cycle, etc.</p>
<p>(Have you taken 7.20? I thought that class was very helpful for the organismal biology part of the biology GRE. Otherwise, re-reading your 7.01x, 7.05, and 7.06 notes should do the job.)</p>
<p>I haven't taken 7.20 (physiology right?) yet. Yea, the organismal biology part was one reason why I was leaning towards the Mole Bio, Biochem one. </p>
<p>Thanks for all the advice! I think I'll look at questions from both and see which one is easier for me.</p>
<p>I am not going to give false hope because it is probably best to take the subject GREs, but I know a couple of people (including myself) that have either not taken them or have done poorly and were still able to get into good schools like Harvard, MIT, etc. This is assuming that you have an adequate amount of research and good recommendations from your research advisor.</p>
<p>i dont really think that the GRE subject test score matters in graduate admission. but it has some weight in fellowship application. plus strangely enough i think grad school put some, though not a lot of emphasis on GRE verbal. i remember the first day of orientation, the dean of my school told us that somehow success of grad students is correlated with their GRE verbal scores...</p>