Question about GRE scores.

Test Preparation
1

<p>I just took the GRE and an very disappointed in my scores. I had 750Q and 400V. I am a chemical engineering/applied math junior student with a 3.82 overall gpa and 4.0 major gpa. </p>

<p>When i took the GRE i found that the biggest issue was the amount of time given. I studied all the lists with the most common GRE vocab words and not even ONE appeared on the test. Math section consisted of a huge number of lengthy word problems so i didnt have time to finish and had to guess which lowered my score. </p>

<p>I am definitely planning on taking the GRE again because i want to go to a top chemical engineering graduate program. If i take it again, will the schools select my highest scores? Lets say next time i get an 800/600 score which is my goal now, would i still be able to get into a top school? or will my previous scores hurt my chances?</p>

2

<p>Cheme, I just took it. I’d been studying the subject matter as well as taking timed linear tests and thought I would ace the math. I worked very hard to find the “tricks” on the verbal section as it’s always been my weakest point. Sadly ended up with a 620 on quantitative which is far lower than any math score I’ve ever gotten. I messed up by not having a better action plan to answer questions in the time given.</p>

<p>I do not think taking it again will hurt you. Most schools will consider both scores at worst, and your most recent one at best. Did you have the scores sent to schools, or not? If not, I think they are scrapped.</p>

<p>They are changing the test and hopefully for the better. I got in the 99th % in verbal and I did it by using a don’t-read-don’t-think method because the reading comp questions are perverted. The questions are stupid and the answers are literally <em>all wrong</em> if you are a scientifically-minded, literal thinking type. Which you probably are.</p>

<p>If you take the CAT as it stands, remember: Do not read the text. First read the answers and eliminate anything that sounds just plain silly. Then read the question, and eliminate more silly. Then you should have one or two answers left. Choose the most bland, non-committal statement. That will be right. Believe me. I’ve always done worse (though satisfactory) on reading comp and could never understand why because on pure vocab tests I do great, perfect scores. Well, I spoke with a test prep professional and she said I’m “over-thinking it”.</p>

<p>How is that possible on a grad-level exam? Answer: They are not testing your knowledge of vocabulary. They are testing your ability to make broad generalizations about words you don’t know when used in certain contexts.</p>

<p>They ASSUME you don’t know the meanings of the words.</p>

<p>Yeah. How messed up is that? It explains why 740 - 800 are <em>all</em> in the 99th%. O_o</p>

<p>Even worse, the “easier” the words (by which they mean, more English roots, less Latin roots, so if you read the Economist instead of Jane Austen, you will know the “hard” words and not the “easy” ones), the more they play fast and loose with them. So like, “conundrum” would be used precisely, but “stiff” would be used in some bizarre figurative way. So the antonym would not be “loose” or “flexible” but something else. So for antonyms and comparisons, you just want to use the emotional connotation of the word (positive, negative) and choose the word or pair that either opposes it (for antonyms) or matches it.</p>

<p>I brought my average CAT score up 200 points using this method. Plus, the “higher” you get, the easier the words are for a math / engineering major. The test goes from “easy” to “hard” if you get the “easy” questions right, but they are only “easy” for an English major with fuzzy thinking skills. They are hard if you’re looking for a precisely right answer. Fuzz your brain up and you’ll do much better.</p>

<p>I only wish I’d cracked this code with the quant section before taking the test.</p>

<p>I’m thinking about taking it again with the new method if I don’t get in this year. If you sign up now as a trial student you get it cheaper, though it takes longer to report the scores.</p>

<p>Good luck! I found the CAT to be totally perverse and punishing of people who are better at logic and precise use of words, worse at generalizations and arithmetic, and the unfairness of the test is reflected in the bell curve of scores, which is totally off. (Seriously… 6% of students are getting perfect scores on quant, and the score distribution after that is all whacked out for both sections.) So don’t feel bad.</p>

3

<p>To play devil’s advocate, why shouldn’t the verbal section be measuring your ability to use words in so-called “fuzzy” ways?</p>

<p>Graduate studies often require reading texts with unfamiliar language. The most effective path to understanding that text is not to rote-memorize zillions of words, but to develop the ability to quickly comprehend a word you don’t know by parsing its context.</p>

<p>I scored 800 verbal without spending one millisecond memorizing words, so I guess I kind of liked the test the way it was. :)</p>

4

<p>Polarscribe, that is a good point, but here’s the problem.</p>

<p>If you actually know the words on the test from a variety of contexts, you may find it hard to ignore their meanings. If you can actually read and comprehend every text fully, you will have a hard time with stupid questions about author’s “intent” (maybe he didn’t succeed at what he intended to do!) or “attitude” because you will know that these are impossible to determine from two or three paragraphs.</p>

<p>I agree that you need to be able to use words without reading the dictionary, but taking a test on words you know should not require you to use them as if you did not. I actually had to ignore knowledge I had. That is not a good test. If you really have good generalization skills you should be able to use your skills on truly unknown words that are very rare.</p>

<p>It’s fine if you have a truly shallow understanding of a moderate vocabulary, but you shouldn’t be punished for having a large, deep vocabulary.</p>

<p>The curve for the test shows that there’s something wrong with it. There is NO REASON so few people should be able to get above a 720. Once you get to that level, the drop-off should decelerate but you should have a good 5% in the pool. They do not. I think this indicates that many of the questions are poorly designed.</p>

<p>The math is worse, but that’s another story!</p>

5

<p>Why would you have to ignore knowledge you already had?</p>

<p>If you don’t know an unfamiliar meaning of a word with multiple meanings, then you actually don’t have full knowledge of that word. That’s when parsing is key - yes, it can be very tricky to sniff out that sort of word choice. But that is part of the writer’s craft.</p>

<p>If you want to argue that the English language is exceedingly silly for having so many words with multiple meanings, I won’t disagree with you. :)</p>

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<p>No, I’m arguing that the questions use imprecise meanings of words–that is to say, not one precise meaning or another, but instead a vague (usually emotional) connotation–when asking the test-taker to make an analogy or find an antonym. It’s all very emotional.</p>

<p>And again, the curve reflects this. The curve is way off (as is the math curve, which is the most messed up standardized test curve I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe they get away with that… it suggests that chance plays the biggest role in weeding people out between 620 and 760, since the same number drop off with each question!!!).</p>

<p>The reading comprehension questions are the worst. As if comprehending a text involves 75% understanding the author’s attitude, intent, and beliefs not mentioned in the text. ONLY English majors believe that those are the important parts of the text. They simply are not. In most majors and in most of life… as in, 99% of life not including Facebook, what you actually write is <em>far more important</em> than what you intended to write. Nobody is going to sit around guessing what you wanted to say. It is a waste of time and futile.</p>

<p>And yet, the GRE spends an inordinate amount of space on questions about “attitude”, “intention”, “meant”, etc.</p>

<p>Their supposedly “hard” questions are all about facts in the passages. Which is so funny, because that’s the easy part. Mind-reading someone whom you’ve never met, who might be dead, who is probably, like most people, wildly inconsistent, full of contradictory beliefs, and likely failing at half the things he attempted to do, is really the hard part.</p>

<p>Not that it’s worth doing. Which is why I say… don’t read, don’t think. If you do, you will see that most of the answers are wrong in one way or another.</p>

7

<p>I’m not an English major, I’m a journalism major - but if you don’t think figuring out subtexts is important, then you aren’t paying enough attention. All kinds of writing has subtexts and inferred meanings beyond the obvious.</p>

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<p>Yes, and the vast majority of writing and communication is designed to play on emotion rather than logic. (Ever listened to a political speech?) We are emotional animals and like it or not, we respond to emotions.</p>

<p>When you read a press release, do you accept that corporate PR flack’s word at face value, or do you parse it for the “story behind the story?” Lots of communication is specifically designed to mislead and confuse. Sometimes, what’s left out of a particular passage is as important as what’s in it. Intentionally obfuscated writing requires the kind of analysis skills the GRE is trying to test.</p>

<p>Whether it does a good job at that, I couldn’t say.</p>

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<p>An example: Corporation puts out a press release saying the CEO has resigned to spend more time with his family.</p>

<p>OK, great, right? No story, nothing to see here. Literal meaning.</p>

<p>Except no CEO quits to spend more time with their family. Those are basically code-words for firing someone, in polite PR-speak. Something is up, but you wouldn’t know it from the literal meaning of the passage. You have to parse it in the context of everything else you know.</p>

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<p>Older S is a math major. Did a practice math subject test, scored well, figured he’d be fine for the GRE Quant. Did not study for the verbal at all; just reads a lot. Did not find it difficult at all, and he is not someone who would be able to tease out subtleties in the emotional tone of words.</p>

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<p>“Yes, and the vast majority of writing and communication is designed to play on emotion rather than logic. (Ever listened to a political speech?) We are emotional animals and like it or not, we respond to emotions.”</p>

<p>“Sometimes, what’s left out of a particular passage is as important as what’s in it.”</p>

<p>These are two different things.</p>

<p>I don’t care what the author meant. I care what she WROTE. She might have intended to do something but totally failed. I am not going to respond to what she wanted to do. The onus is on the writer to communicate clearly and specifically what she wants to say.</p>

<p>Emotional writing, I was taught, is bad writing. And I can recognize bad writing. I just don’t read it. No point. If you can’t think clearly and are trying to pull a fast one on your audience, I turn it off. I don’t try to read your miasmic mind. Not you personally, LOL. I do not watch the news, I read it. I do not read the opinion pages. They are rarely worth reading. When I do, I pick out the facts and consider them.</p>

<p>If everyone did this, there would be a much greater appreciation of the world as an ambiguous and complex place.</p>

<p>You should never have to ignore the meaning of a word, or even all of its meanings, to get the meaning of a sentence. If you have to, you are listening to someone who is not worth listening to and wasting your time. They are clearly an illogical manipulator who probably just wants your money or attention.</p>

<p>Maybe this is why people don’t like… never mind. But if what passes for reading skills are actually MIND reading skills, the state of academia has truly disintegrated. I was never asked those questions in college. (Philosophy and Classics, with all the pre-reqs.)</p>

<p>Oh, no. Wait. LOL. I was. Worst class I ever took. An English teacher with a body issue problem. Thought everyone was against women and hated her thighs. She gave As to all her favorites–fat women, sorry, nothing against fat women but her class was all about how society hates fat women and women in general (did we read any English literature? No.) and how they secretly are saying it everywhere. So these girls all basically echoed her views. I got a B which was pretty good considering my final thesis was about how her class sucked and had nothing to do with the English language.</p>

<p>I bet she would get an 800 on this GRE as well. Not that you are a fat ex-model with body image issues, LOL. Obviously you understand what they are looking for, which is fuzzy thinking and emotional psychic powers, which is okay with you.</p>

<p>I, however, do not support that type of thinking under any circumstances and am appalled that it is required for entrance to college or suggested as an actual virtue.</p>

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<p>"You have to parse it in the context of everything else you know. "</p>

<p>That is not how the GRE works, though.</p>

<p>There is no context. You cannot use your own cultural context, because the questions are about the author’s INTENT, and you are not told anything about the author, or anything about the context in which the article appeared, or whether it it the whole article. You are told to consider it in and of itself.</p>

<p>Common sense would not figure in because you do not know if the author showed common sense.</p>

<p>And as for the CEO resigning…</p>

<p>Those are code-words, as you said. It’s a common euphemism. If they say someone in Russia died of a heart attack, you know he was assassinated. Again, euphemism. The GRE does not ask about euphemisms, in general. It asks about “intention”, “attitude”, etc. This is different. Have you ever stopped to think, “What was the author’s ATTITUDE when she wrote that headline?” I mean really? Like when the article is about, as GRE texts generally are, 19th century Russian art, or a new discovery in geology, or common misperceptions of journalists among new immigrant groups? Really? Like, “Gee, I wonder what she REALLY means when she says that igneous rock does not contain the same number of isotopes as rocks from outer space. What was she thinking?”</p>

<p>The question ought to be, “Which of the following statements is logically compatible with the statement in line 11?”</p>

<p>Because she MIGHT have been thinking, “God, why is he leaving me? THINK CHRISTINE THINK. Isotopes. Oh my God I hate this article. It’s the science that has caused him to leave. I’m such a nerd. What was I writing? Oh, yeah. Igneous rocks.”</p>

<p>You have NO IDEA. People are inconsistent and often fail. If they want to know about how we can evaluate headlines and news articles or opinion pieces, that would be different. They should put some in the test! Not try to get us to use those skills on pieces that should not be held to the same standard and assumptions.</p>

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<p>Humans are not machines, we are animals - with thoughts, feelings and emotions. We very often respond to the world around us based on those thoughts, feelings and emotions. Communication which manipulates those emotions can have major impacts on the history of the world.</p>

<p>How did Hitler come to power? Clever, no, brilliant use of mass communication to manipulate the German people into believing they were an invincible master race - despite having lost a bloody, terrible war just 20 years previous.</p>

<p>The fact that you supposedly just “ignore” emotional communication makes you one of a very, very small minority. (I guess you don’t read novels or most non-fiction?) Most people are the opposite - they ignore emotionless communication. How many people do you think read scientific journals for fun?</p>

<p>What you or I might like in a perfect world notwithstanding, we live in the world we have. That’s a world of emotion. If you don’t think that’s important to understand, you will never be able to connect with the masses. If we don’t build a bridge from reason to the emotions people feel, unreason (untempered emotion) will rule.</p>

<p>“The onus is on the writer to communicate clearly and specifically what she wants to say.”</p>

<p>And how do you discern the difference between something that has been poorly written and something intentionally obfuscated?</p>

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<p>Wow, Godwin’s Law at work pretty fast there!</p>

<p>Honestly, the texts in the GRE are supposed to be taken from academic sources. If I thought for a moment that I was being asked to evaluate newspaper articles or political speeches, I would have an entirely different context. But the context for the GRE articles is an academic one.</p>

<p>However, it is worth noting that the “true” answer in the GRE is nearly always the most bland, noncommittal answer among the choices. This suggests that the test-makers do <em>not</em> think that there is a lot being said behind the lines. (I’m sure you could take the Princeton Review’s online test and check your answers, and the ETS also offers a sample… you will see what I mean.) It’s somewhat paradoxical.</p>

<p>And I do read fiction. I enjoy it immensely. However, I also have the capacity to treat non-fiction from different sources in different ways than I treat fiction. When I read, for example, Vonnegut, I realized soon enough that it was satire. Thus, “So it goes,” could be understood to have a much deeper meaning than it would appear to, literally.</p>

<p>However, when reading, say, the New York Times, outside of the opinion pages, I assume that it is not satire. (They print satires only in their opinion pages. This is a question of fact.)</p>

<p>If I were to encounter, say, two or three paragraphs from certain non-satire articles taken from the New York Times in the GRE, it would be silly for me to try to guess whether or not they are satire. There simply is not enough context to make that decision. Even two or three paragraphs of Kurt Vonnegut, taken from certain books, would not tip you off that it is satire.</p>

<p>I simply do not think that asking people to make the same generalizations that they would after reading an entire novel, or reading a newspaper in context, is wise. It’s not the same type of reading, and most students realize that and refrain from making those assumptions.</p>

<p>They are then faced with the difficult task of choosing the least-wrong answer, which is much more difficult than choosing the right one. I would argue that this is the primary reason the curve is off. People who have the breadth and width of vocabulary for the exam also have the good sense to hold off on making judgments of the type they are asked to on that exam, so very few make it past 86% or whatever it is where it drops off to the 99th%ile.</p>