Chapter 1

Knowing the GRE

IN THIS CHAPTER

Knowing the layout of the GRE

Understanding how your scores are calculated

Bringing the GRE into your comfort zone

The GRE isn’t an IQ test, nor is it a measure of your worth as a human being or a predictor of your ultimate success in life. The GRE is designed to assess your ability to excel in grad school by sizing you up in three areas.

• Work ethic: How hard you’re willing and able to work to achieve an elusive academic goal — in this case, performing well on the GRE. This reflects your work ethic, and graduate schools consider this to be a measure of how hard you’ll work in their programs.
• Study skills: How well you can master some basic study skills and be able to process and retain new information.
• Test-taking ability: How well you can perform on a test, under pressure, which is a separate ability from being able to answer the questions. Exams are ubiquitous (appearing everywhere) to grad school, so you need to prove that you can take one without folding under pressure.

This book can guide you in the first area, but it’s mostly up to you. As a study guide, however, this book shows you how to achieve the second and third areas, enabling you to study more effectively and efficiently and improve your overall test-taking skills. By knowing the material and taking the practice tests, you establish a foundation for doing well on the GRE. And usually, if you know what to do and how to do it, you might find yourself working a little bit harder. In this way, this book helps you further in that first area.

In this chapter, I discuss the GRE’s structure and scoring system so you can build your strategies around them. With this guidance, you’re better equipped to avoid surprises that may throw you off your game.

Knowing the GRE Sections

Standardized tests tend to bring on the chills. Telling someone you have to take the SAT, ACT, or GRE usually gets the same response as saying that you need to have your wisdom teeth pulled. However, with this book, the GRE isn’t such a chilling experience, and breaking it down to its component parts makes it more manageable and less threatening.

Table 1-1 provides a quick overview of what’s on the exam, in this order.

TABLE 1-1 GRE Breakdown by Section

At two hours long, the GRE challenges your stamina as much as your ability to answer the questions. It’s not that much time, but it’s more intense than most people are used to. No matter how solid your math and verbal skills are, you have to maintain your focus for the whole stretch, which isn’t easy on a challenging task such as this. Build your test-taking stamina by practicing in two-hour sessions and taking timed practice tests.

There is no unscored section, but some unscored questions are mixed into some sections. Of course, you have no way of knowing which question is unscored, so treat each one as if it counts.

The GRE allows you to skip questions and return to them later, within that section. When you reach the end of a section, the GRE displays a review screen that indicates any unanswered questions. If you have time remaining in the section, return to these questions and answer them as well as you can. This feature is nice because you can knock out the easy questions first before spending time on the hard ones. (See Chapter 2 for more on planning your time.)

So what types of questions are there and how many of them can you expect on the GRE? Here’s Table 1-2 with the details.

TABLE 1-2 GRE Breakdown by Question Type

Note that the question types are mixed throughout their sections, so you may encounter them in any order. Sometimes the software groups similar questions at the beginning or the end. For example, if you’re halfway through a Verbal section and haven’t seen a Text Completion question, you will.

Seeing the Scores

With the GRE, you receive three separate scores: Verbal, Math, and Analytical Writing. You drive home knowing your unofficial Verbal and Math scores (as explained in the following section), but you get your Analytical Writing score about two weeks later.

On the GRE, you can score a maximum of 340 points on the multiple-choice and 6 points on the essay. Here’s the scoring range for each section.

• Verbal: The Verbal score ranges from 130 to 170 in 1-point increments. You get 130 points if you answer just one question, but that won’t help you much: You need to score as well as or better than most of the other test-takers to improve your chances of being admitted to your target school. The chapters in Part 2 give you the lowdown on the Verbal sections.
• Math: The Math score also ranges from 130 to 170 in 1-point increments. The chapters in Part 3 have more on the Math sections.
• Analytical Writing: The Analytical Writing score ranges from 0 to 6, in half-point increments, with 6 being the highest. More on how the essay is scored in Part 4.

If a multiple-choice question requires two or more answers, you have to get all the answers correct; there is no partial credit. However, you don’t lose points for a wrong answer, so if you’re not sure, take a guess and return to the question later. More on this strategy in Chapter 2.

Calculating your score

Within each section, each question counts exactly the same toward your score: The more questions you get right, the higher your score for that section. An easy question is worth the same as a hard question. Because you can move back and forth within each section, one strategy is to skip around and answer all the easy questions first, then go back and work the hard questions. If you like this idea, try it out on a practice test before exam day.

The GRE online makes the second Math or Verbal section either easier or harder based on your performance. For example, if you do extremely well on the first Math section, the GRE makes the second Math section harder. Even if you don’t get as many right answers in the second Math section, your score will be good, and it’ll definitely be higher than the score of someone who bombs the first Math section but gets them all right in the second one. GRE scoring accommodates for the difficulty level of the questions in the second section.

The strategy of bombing the first Math and Verbal sections in order to answer more questions correctly on the respective second sections isn’t a good idea, and you’ll end up with a low score. The exam doesn’t score you based solely on the number of correct answers: It scores you based on how smart it thinks you are. So if you do great on the first Math section, the exam thinks you’re smart and ups the difficulty level for the second Math section. If you don’t answer all those questions correctly, that’s okay: The questions are harder, and the exam has evaluated your skills. Conversely, if you bomb the first Math section, the exam thinks you’re not good at math, so it drops the level for the second Math section. If you answer most of those questions correctly, it doesn’t help your score much because those questions are easier.

When you complete a practice test from Part 5, you can easily estimate your Math and Verbal scores. For the Math score, give yourself 1.5 points for each math question you...