THE NEVERENDING STORY: There were some pretty strange children’s movies when I was a kid. Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, the so-bad-it’s-good Ron Howard movie Willow (featuring Real Genius and Top Gun star Val Kilmer), and the still-disturbing leporine epic Watership Down. But insofar as capturing the imagination of the archetypical misunderstood eight-year-old (imagine the eighties version of Harry Potter), nothing surpassed The Neverending Story, […]
If You School Accepts GRE Score Select, Should You Use It?
With the appearance of the new GRE Score Select option (which you can read about on the GRE website, here), a whole new world of opportunities has opened up for students:
Algebra Challenge: Quadratics and Negative Exponents
GRE algebra questions will occasionally hit you with a quadratic equation. To solve it, you won’t need the quadratic formula. You probably won’t even need the FOIL method. GRE Quant permits—and often rewards—problem solving methods that buck the conventions taught in high school math classes. To see what I mean, try these two algebra problems […]
Can an LSAT Score Replace a GRE or GMAT Score?
When you think of the LSAT, you probably think of law school, not graduate or business school. Yet an LSAT score can be used when applying to certain Master’s programs, including some that award an MBA. Which Master’s programs accept LSAT scores? Just as many business programs (thousands of them, in fact) let you take […]
How do “Implicit Associations” Affect Your Performance on the GRE?
Two students are identical in most respects. They have identical SAT scores, identical GPAs, and are both preparing to take the GRE. They both say they’re very motivated to get a top score. Which of them is likely to earn a higher score? A fascinating new article by Melissa J. Ferguson, Professor of Psychology at Cornell, […]
GRE vs. MAT: Which Test if for You?
Exam acronyms and grad school admissions go hand-in-hand. GRE comes up a lot, of course, but there’s also MAT. The GRE stands for the Graduate Record Examinations and MAT stands for Miller Analogies Test. The program you’re applying to may accept scores from either exam, so which test do you choose? Start by considering the […]
3 Key Facts about e-Rater and Automated GRE Essay Scores
Every year more than a million GRE essays cross the desks of ETS essay raters. These same submissions slide through the subroutines of e-rater, an automated scoring program developed by ETS. With a scoring speed of 800 essays per second, e-rater could evaluate every GRE essay from 2013–2014 (about 1.1 million submissions) in under 25 […]
GRE Verbal Scores for Top Education Programs
Education is a popular field of graduate study in the US. It’s the number one discipline for doctoral degrees (MD and JD excluded) and a close second to Business for master’s degrees. Hoping to get into a top program? A strong GRE Verbal score may help. Take a look at the Verbal scores for Education programs ranked in […]
Essays Get Automated Scores… Why Not Report Them in the Test Center?
Right after you take the computer-based GRE, unofficial scores are available for Quant and Verbal but not Analytical Writing. You won’t learn how you did on the GRE’s essay section until your official scores come out about two weeks later. Yet a mere two milliseconds is enough time to score your essays with e-rater, the […]
GRE Text Completion Challenge: Follow the Clues
GRE Text Completion gives you a sizable chunk of text to parse when you have multiple blanks to fill. Putting all the context clues together can be tricky, and any hard vocabulary that pops up, whether in the text or the answer choices, won’t make your work any easier. Get some practice with this challenging three-blank […]