<p>My D is a Junior in college and planning to take the GRE this summer. She doesn't know many people who have taken it and is in the dark as to how much preparation is needed. She is an excellent student in the sciences who has taken high level maths. </p>
<p>What does she need to know? Is it advisable to take a prep class or is a book sufficient for most students? If one takes it more than once, does that reflect badly when applying for admission to grad programs? She's thinking she might take it without a prep class and if she doesn't do as well as she hopes, she can then take a class and try again.</p>
<p>Wouldnt you take it when you are a senior or after you graduate?
Depending on field, its good to have work experience before applying to grad school.
My oldest took it a year or so,after she graduated. She did not take a prep course, but I think she reviewed her math.
She did very,very well. her math was her strongest section and that is typically her weakest.
:)</p>
<p>My advice to your daughter is to use a review book and work at it. I am sure the prep classes help, but for the cost, I am not sure how much they would help compared to working on her own.
Even though she has taken high level math, the math is not at an advanced level. One pitfall is that students in advanced classes may not have done this math for many years. It won’t be difficult for an advanced math student, but she may have forgotten some of it.
The verbal is a challenge for STEM students, unless they are avid readers. The average score includes students who are English and other humanities majors, and they have been reading for their classes while STEM students take sciences that do not involve literature. Much of it is vocabulary. She should study. However, for some science graduate students, the math and subject GRE may carry a higher weight than verbal.
She doesn’t have to stress, but due to the expense of the test ( about $150 ), taking it without preparation is an expensive practice.</p>
<p>I’m not sure when she plans to apply to grad school since she is still trying to decide what to study! She’s contemplating PA school, nursing school leading to Nurse Practitioner license or a masters in Epidemiology. </p>
<p>It sounds like the content of the GRE is manageable for her. Probably just needs a prep book.</p>
<p>I think I will tell her to visit her advisor about the timing of this and whether she should be taking a subject test rather than the general test.</p>
<p>If she is far enough along in college to be taking the GRE, I’d expect she has a good amount of experience in preparing for tests on her own and can figure out the details of the GRE on her own. That said, I’d expect the preparation to be similar to how she prepared for the SAT. Prior to taking the GRE, I took a practice test to identify weak points, then spent several hours going over vocabulary, which was my only weak area identified in the practice test.</p>
<p>As Pennylane noted, different sections are harder or easier for different students. Just as STEM students sometimes struggle with the verbal section, humanities kids often struggle with the math. Many may not have had any math since high school, or only a social science-oriented statistics course.</p>
<p>My son did several practice tests, and then hired a tutor for three one-hour sessions to review some of the math with him. He felt that the small investment in a tutor was a good investment in time, money and a good score. Before his first meeting with the tutor, he scanned and emailed the tutor his practice tests so that a tutoring plan could be developed that addressed his weaknesses.</p>
<p>(Brag alert) My son killed the GRE, getting above the 90th percentile on both sections. It gave him a lot of grad school options.</p>
<p>I’m also graduating next spring and applying for grad school for the fall 2014 semester. I’m taking the GRE at the end of June. If you go to the GRE website, you can download two free practice tests. She should probably take one just to make sure it’s manageable. I got a review book and everything is flooding back to me from the SATs.</p>
<p>Just don’t put too much pressure on yourself with the GRE. For pretty much every school out there (even the tippy top ones) it’s at most a check box you need to fill by getting a score that’s good enough. I, embarrassingly enough, did worse on the Math section than the other two (as a STEM person), yet I was still able to get into a number of top 10 grad schools in my field.</p>
<p>I did a google search last month on SAT vs GRE and found out that the Math section on the GRE is actually easier than SAT math–it doesn’t go into as many of the higher-level concepts that the SAT covers.</p>
<p>It’s been years since I was in grad school, but it used to be that a number of schools required both the general test and the subject test. It would be a good idea to look at requirements for the schools she’s interested in.</p>
<p>My son wants to go to graduate school and I know nothing about the GRE but someone stated to go to their website for sample tests. I would love to know the actual website address for the sample tests. Thank you so much for any help.</p>
<p>I think that S spent at least a few hours reviewing the math, since he hadn’t taken an actual math class since freshman year. He also at least familiarized himself with the types of prompts/questions in the Writing section.</p>
<p>He took the test after being kept up almost all night by his bizarre roommates in a Paris youth hostel. His scores were about the same as his no-prep SATs, which were Presidential Scholar-level in our state. I think it’s just one of those things: some people are good at these tests without working at it. Some people really do need to prep.</p>
<p>I found it ridiculously easy after going through a technical undergrad education. You are taking the same test as all of the education and journalism majors. My wife, a nursing major, also didn’t need to prepare at all.</p>
<p>Get a study book with sample tests to make sure she doesn’t have any real holes in her capacity to do well. Then, she will know how much to study.</p>
<p>Magnetron, this English major never took a math class in college before taking the GRE and managed a 760 on the M section with no prep. There is no need to slam other people based on their majors.</p>
<p>Oh goodness, my apologies Consolation as this was not my intended message at all. My dad was a HS English teacher, started as a journalism major, who took exactly one math class as an undergrad so I used his experience as an example.</p>
<p>In HS, we see the SAT used as a catch-all to test the level of learning for the students who go through mostly similar curricula. Using the GRE as a catch-all becomes odd as studies diverge wildly in college (STEM, even one not really math intensive like Nursing, vs. something without math but writing intensive). </p>
<p>It may be worth noting that you did better in “my” math than I did in “your” English (730).</p>
<p>Before the changes in 2011, the GRE math portion was much like the SATs from before 1994. Now it has elements of the current SAT (calculator use, free-response questions) and pre-2005 SATs (quantitative comparison questions) as well as non-SAT elements (multiple-choice questions with more than one correct answer).</p>
<p>Daughter took GRE in fall of senior year ( 2011) with a small amount of self-study. She is a Philosophy graduate who finished with a 3.68 at a top 50 LAC. She blew out the verbal potion 94%+, but struggled with the math portion. Like several other prior posters, she said you have to be up to speed on what she thinks of as the same advanced (?) math courses she took in high school. As a liberal arts major, she was required to take finite Algebra-but took it her freshman year. She is now beginning to apply to graduate schools and advisers want her math score to be higher. So, I would advise practice tests and if your score is not above 60 percentile ( depending upon graduate area of study) work with a tutor. Perhaps the best advice is to find out what acceptable scores are for the graduate programs you are interested in attending.</p>
I think that all of those 'useless majors" threads have made me hypersensitive.</p>