<p>Hi I am a currently a sophomore in a college in Boston and I was wondering how many years does it take for people to study for the GRE? I am aiming at a perfect score to make up for some imperfect things on my application, and I just need it to be perfect. So how long does it take to perfect it?</p>
<p>I know for SAT people start prepping when they are 23 like those PSATS and stuff.</p>
<p>Thanks so much!</p>
<p>GRE testing looks at the same kinds of skills as expected-math, english, logic. You’ll forget a lot of stuff by the time you take it. We didn’t really have a lot of time in senior year but we had GRE study groups.</p>
<p>A GRE will generally not make up for anything deficient on your application. It is not a particularly important part of the package - more of a first screening tool. It is much more important to put effort into meaningful things such as research experiences. That will be much more valuable on your application than a small GRE score boost.</p>
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I doubt most people study for years. I suspect the mean time is perhaps a couple of months for native English speakers, a bit more for others.</p>
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The only place a high GRE will generally help is when you are applying for cross-disciplinary funding, like university or NSF fellowships. Otherwise, a perfect GRE score is no better than a decent GRE score, and the time spent going from decent to perfect is time that could be spent on genuinely meaningful things.</p>
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Depends on your starting point. Take a practice GRE or two, and see how your scores look. If you are in the 50th percentile and want to be in the 90th, then that will take a lot of study but will be worthwhile. If you are in the 90th percentile and want to be in the 98th, then that is probably just a few months of study… but won’t really accomplish anything.</p>
<p>Something you need to understand is that applying for graduate school is a lot different than applying for college. Many of the things that were so important in getting into college are absolutely meaningless for grad school, and emphasizing them can actually hurt your application. Your GRE needs to be adequate for the range of schools you want - your GPA is FAR more important than GRE, and for the most part your research credentials are much more important still. Get good grades, get into some research, explore your field, and stop worrying about the GRE.</p>
<p>It depends on your SAT and test-taking skills. I had high SAT scores and I used to teach SAT classes, so I only prepped for the GRE for about 1-2 months before I took it. You definitely do not need a perfect score; as was already stated, a perfect GRE score won’t make up for mediocre or poor marks elsewhere. It’s the least important part of your application.</p>
<p>If you’re really worried you can begin studying in the spring of your junior year in college (no earlier than April, I would say) and then take it in June or July of the summer between your junior and senior year. That gives you time to retake it in the fall if you feel you need to.</p>
<p>The more concerning thing is that you are a sophomore in college and you are already thinking about making up for stuff. Rather than spending time trying to raise your GRE scores to “make up” for other things…you should concentrate on raising the things you want to make up for (high GPA, good research experience/internships, etc.)</p>
<p>This was discussed this past summer; this thread may be helpful</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/1533150-how-long-study-gre.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/graduate-school/1533150-how-long-study-gre.html</a></p>
<p>11 months. Native speaker. Got all 90%+</p>
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Did you have any measure of how you were doing before studying for 11 months? A practice exam or anything? I took a practice test, was satisfied with the results, and didn’t study at all and got almost exactly the same results in the real test. I don’t know how you can say how much work you need to do without knowing where you are starting.</p>
<p>Studied 2 weeks, got 80%+ in all areas. GREs are the least important part of your application, they’re mostly used as a negative cutoff. No one’s getting into a program solely because of a perfect GRE.</p>
<p>On the contrary, I have heard of people getting in based on exceptional GRE scores. There’s been a few instances where one of my professors was bragging about what their student got on the GRE.</p>
<p>If you’re aiming for a perfect score in all categories, then the hard truth is that you will most likely fail. Your question is very strange anyways. How areother people’s length of preparation time going to help you?</p>
<p>If you did good on the SAT, you probably don’t need to prepare too much. I found the GRE easier than the SAT, especially the math.</p>
<p>I studied for a month… 800v, 540q - I’ve never been good at math and, because I’m in the social sciences, frankly the quant didn’t really matter.</p>
<p>Are you talking about subject GREs, DoubleD? Because a huge percentage of some STEM-based applicants get a perfect math score, it’s not considered a big deal. The subject tests are significantly more difficult and are the only GRE scores I can even imagine that scenario playing out. If I ever heard someone genuinely bragging about their GRE scores (or their students), I’d laugh them out of the lab.</p>
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Literally the only time I have EVER heard anything like this was with a department that was so broke that they were only accepting students that qualified for a university fellowship (based entirely on GPA and GRE!). </p>
<p>FWIW, I didn’t study at all. I took a practice exam, liked where I was at, took the exam and got almost exactly what I had on the practice - perfect 800 Q (94th percentile) and 6.0 AW (92nd percentile), and a 720 V (98th percentile). I had interviews at 5 schools (3 public, 2 private), with 3+ professors at each, and not ONCE did my GRE come up even in passing.</p>
<p>no im talking about the general test. getting a perfect Q is a joke for STEM majors, even with the new gre. one of them was bragging about his student getting a near perfect score on all 3 categories. another one (i’m a mechanical&aerospace engineering major) was talking about how he really expects applicants to score in the top 10 percentile in the verbal and analytical since the Q is so easy for engineers and they needed other ways to critique from standardized testing.</p>
<p>There was one instance where a very highly regarded professor in my field that was telling us how getting into the most selective graduate schools requires you to be strong in 3 main categories: GRE, GPA, and researcH as I recall. He used the 3-legged stool example and said if you’re weak in one area, your stool(application) would not be standing (accepted). He also mentioned that if you score very highly, the chances are that you are a superior student (he mentioned something about acceptable students being good at everything), but if you score poorly, then the chances of you being an acceptable student is not high despite the other parts of the app , which makes sense I guess.</p>
<p>FWIW, most professors I have talked to have said applicants should really prepare “hard” for the GRE. I don’t know their intentions with this since applicants really get nothing in return to help their graduate studies from this. I thought it was to boost rankings at first, but I found out GRE scores contribute very minimally to rankings. Also, most graduate students I have talked to said that the GRE is not a deciding factor (they didn’t mention it’s particular importance), but they also coincidentally scored very high,</p>
<p>DoubleD - are you at Princeton University? I ask because I have heard that the Ivy’s pay more attention to “breadth” issues (like languages and possibly GRE) even at the grad level, but this is not common to other schools. MIT doesn’t ask engineering applicants to include the GRE, because they don’t think it really tells them anything!</p>
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Hardly anyone cares about those scores, because they really do not indicate anything that you will use in grad school for STEM fields.</p>
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I have certainly known people weak variously in each of those areas who have been accepted at top programs. You can’t be bad, but a lot of universities and professors (even at the top) seem to be fine with students who are less than perfect in some area.</p>
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I have actually heard a few professors say they largely ignored the GRE because the design of the test and availability of resources meant that even poor students could score highly with enough preparation time. A poor score is still troubling, but (for example) I have seen foreign students with terrible writing skills who did fantastic on the V and AW portions of the GRE.</p>
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Never, ever had one mention it to me. Even at the information sessions about preparing for grad school applications, it was mentioned only in passing.</p>
<p>You seem to have a very different experience with the GRE than most on here. Perhaps your experience is more common, perhaps it is relatively rare, but just as some schools ignore the GRE maybe it is not that surprising that there are some schools that emphasize it!</p>
<p>I suggest taking a prep test now to see how much time you need.
I took GRE 3 weeks after my toefl. I took a prep test (the one ETS provides in the practice book) before studying, and 3 other tests (provided by ETS again) three weeks later (1, 2 & 3 days before my exam). During these three weeks only my Verbal score changed, because of the vocabulary I had memorized. I scored 150 at first. Between 155-160 at the last three. 155 on real test. My math remained unchanged (169)
If you want to raise your score substantially, it would take more than 3 weeks, I guess. In 2-3 weeks you can just get to know what the exam is like. That’s why suggest taking a test now(or maybe a bit later, since you still have a lot of time), however, personally I think spending a year on it would be quite boring.
By the way, ETS has provided the pool of Issue and Analytic writing tasks’ topics on its website, and chooses the real test topics from them. One of my friends had seen(and practiced!) both of the writing tasks before. So, if you have time,…
P.S. I recently asked a graduate program advisor (engineering) about the importance of GRE, and he told me: GRE is rather important–especially for the Q portion.</p>
<p>Yes, I am at Princeton, but actually, we don’t really care about the GRE from what I know unless you do really badly on the quant (our averages are still pretty high oddly - 90%+ verbal). </p>
<p>I was actually talking to a professor from Caltech. I didn’t bother asking what was his reasoning for wanting students to score highly. Their aerospace engineering admissions system is pretty weird and is by far the most selective engineering program.</p>
<p>Another thing that comes to mind are internal&external funding consideration, which seems to make the most sense when professors suggest having very high GRE scores. </p>
<p>I thought it was only MIT’s ECE program that doesn’t require the GRE? I’m pretty sure their aeronautics and mechanical engineering programs do. I remember seeing something about them desiring applicants to score 80%+ in quant&analytical. </p>
<p>It also seems that foreign profs, particularly those from countries in Asia, care more about numbers since that’s the system they grew up in.</p>