One of the things that will hopefully help in my grad school admissions are my standardized test scores. I remember getting a decent SAT score, and I never even took the ACT. Luckily, I still got into my school of choice, UNM. Well, it was my only choice, really.
I’ve heard people say that the GRE really did a number on them. They went in unprepared and suffered the consequences. While a high GRE score probably won’t guarantee that I’ll get accepted into the more difficult universities, it definitely won’t hurt.
I went ahead and tried the practice test over at the Princeton Review. The first time I tried it, I was fairly distracted and I was going fast to see how long it would take. I ended up taking about 2/3 of the time for both parts. I skipped the writing parts, since they wouldn’t get graded anyway unless I paid for it. I got a pretty bad score the first time. I don’t remember what I got though, since I deleted it and tried again.
Luckily, the test questions are somewhat randomized. I only got two or so duplicates. The second time through, I took more time and tried being more careful. I still missed a few questions. The cool thing about the practice tests is that you can see exactly what you missed and get an explanation of why you missed it.
The final scores on the second test run were 630 for both the verbal and quantitative sections. While that’s great for the verbal score, as an Engineering major, my quantitative score needs to be much higher.
Looking at the questions I missed, they were a mix of careless mistakes and lack of trigonometry/probability knowledge. I guess it’s not really a lack so much as a need to brush up. I haven’t done any math involving trig or probability in a really long time. Since I know what I need to work on, I should be able to raise my scores before I take the real test
If you haven’t taken the GRE and haven’t done any preparation, I’d suggest at least trying out the practice test over at the Princeton Review. I don’t know how close it is to the real GRE, but at least I’m feeling more confident about my strengths and weaknesses.