raspberrysour

hi maria, another thing i wanted to share with you...something my advisor shared with me the night before i wrote my exam. i confessed to having jitters about getting into the grad schools i wanted, regardless of test performance. his advice to me was not to hinge my heartstrings on a high score because there IS no guarantee that a high (or in his opinion, even low) scores will PROMISE entry. in his own words, experience will come out on top any day of the week. it's a weird little mixture of grades, test scores, interesting course work, letter of statement/letter of recommendations. the reason why i'm telling you this is because confidence will matter the most in taking this test. as a psychology student, you should be familiar with mood-dependent performance. remember that it's just a test and it doesn't indicate how intelligent you actually are. anyway go rock it.

Verbal sections were the same as powerprep, the same as all the review guides. I went through the word lists in Barron's and Kaplan's a few times, but I was fairly familiar with a good chunk of them already. In all honesty, my preparation for the verbal was less than adequate. I would say that studying the top word lists in both was definitely key; I saw MANY words there from those lists. Reading comprehension...meh. My AWA sections were also the same as the powerprep. My issue choices were vaguely interesting and touched on ideas that anyone could make some statement on (one was whether the government should restrict scientific research). My argument paragraph was very straightforward. My question was easy to argue from either side, if you are familiar at all with arguing against yourself. I spent more time checking my spelling and grammar than I did making a very strong argument...maybe that will hurt my writing score. I'll let you all know.

The variable questions are really testing if you understand how numbers work in a variety of situations. So I spent a lot of time on basic arithmetic more than algebra or geometry. I spent a lot of time on ratio and rate problems so that I could practice both my arithmetic and my understanding of the relationship between numbers. I also spent a lot of time on percentages, which was another way of working with decimals in an applied setting. I had a few percentage problems on my exam that were like, find X% of 100-X% (after you figured out what they were actually asking for). Being really familiar with decimals made it 1) easy to solve and 2) easy to figure out if my answer was even remotely logical or not. IMHO, the key with those variable problems is not trying to solve them, but to try and figure out what WOULD happen with a set of valid numbers. So when they say something like "X>0, is 4^1/x > 4^x/2x?", you have to think about how the formula will act when X = 1, 2, 3...inf, as well as .1, .2, .3...inf. If you have spent a lot of time with arithmetic (fractions and decimals, exponents), you will be able to see how that works instantly. The second thing I would say is watch out for negative and fraction values! If you have some question where it says something like "X != 0", then you know that it can be negative or positive or a fraction/decimal right off the bat. Those are trick questions. Finally, I have a real problem with reading questions...I *know* I lost most of my marks on RC in the verbal, for example. With DI questions, I tend to not read the question carefully. Those are killers.

Hi folks, I'm a lurker who spent all my time working on math problems from the forums. I did my undergrad in psychology and am applying to grad programs in exp. psych and possibly sociology. I have failed math several times and was really worried about that more so than anything. I was not worried about the verbal at all because I've always been strong with vocabulary. I took the test yesterday and got a V: 650, Q: 760. I'm a little shocked. I never scored over 670 on the quant for any practice test, and that 670 was an outlier. My average was almost always around 600. My verbal score was consistently 650 (I hardly ever bothered to do the reading sections thoroughly and thus got tons of RC questions wrong on every test I took), so I was prepared for that. My experience? All of the math prep I did really helped me understand how numbers *worked*, rather than knowing a bunch of formulas. I spent a lot of time working on really basic arithmetic (multiplying/dividing fractions/decimals) and that helped a lot. For questions where I had no idea, I would do a lot of plug and chug because I had developed the number crunching speed you need to do that. I still don't see HOW I got a 760 (I suspect I had a lot of lucky guesses) but that's how I studied for it. I had one question on Std. Dev., no probability, two on geometry, and the rest were all either replacement problems or pure variables. I spent close to 20 minutes on the first 10 problems and found myself racing against the clock for the rest. Anyway, that's my story. I wish I had spent more time on the verbal overall so I could have gotten a really rocking total, but I am more than satisfied with my score. P.S. I'm not exaggerating when I say I am REALLY bad at math. I have failed Algebra, Calculus...never received anything higher than a C- after grade 6. I practiced my arithmetic VORACIOUSLY for this exam. I'm actually shocked at how little arithmetic I actually knew.

Start at Time = 5pm (arbitrary) 5:20 (james rests), +5 = 5:25, 5:45 (james rests), +5 = 5:50, 6:10 (james rests), +5 = 6:15, 6:35 (james rests), +5 = 6:40, 7:10 (james rests), +5 = 7:15, 7:35 (james rests), 7:40, 8:00 (finished) 5:30 (mike rests), +5 = 5:35, 6:05 (mike rests), +5 = 6:10, 6:40 (mike rests), +5 = 6:45, 7:15 (mike rests), +5 = 7:20, 7:50 (mike rests), 7:55, 8:00 (finished). They never rest at the same time. Therefore, A has to be bigger. Is this right?

yeah, it was hard for me to determine just how applicable the review material i used was for the exam. i've taken a lot of physiological and cognitive psych, so most of those questions (i.e. prosopagnosia, schwann cells, etc) were right up my alley. i thought that the social psych and personality sections were pretty good in the review materials. i had never taken those classes and i was able to answer the questions on social psych and personality (at least some of them).

there was definitely more physiological psych than i thought would be, luckily i knew that stuff pretty well. there was also more applied and organizational psych than i thought there would be. i thought the princeton review was a pretty good book to get if you were interested in only being able to answer about 70% of the test. i thought the barron's book sucked and i never looked at the kaplan book. how confident do you feel about it?

Hey all, Just wrote the GRE Psych test. If anyone has questions, let me know.

Oooh i see...so when you know that x + y = ... 4 and when you do the addition of x and y such that x = ... 11 and y = ... 21, you simply compare the two? So we know that x + y = ... 4, but when we take the x and y equations on their own, we get 32, which means that some number larger than 21 and smaller than 32 is the divisor. 32 -4 = 28, so that's that? Are problems like this very common on the GRE? I have to say, I don't think I could have solved this cold in 2 minutes...

I'm sorry, I'm still getting lost in the algebra. I see the x + y = a (k1 + k2) + 4 relationship. I don't see how you went from this: " (x+y)/a = (k1+k2) + 32/a " to this: "given remainder when 32/a = 4 so a is 28 .." If a = 28, how can 32/28 = 4? I know I'm missing something obvious here, but I can't wrap my mind around it.

New poster here... I'm still not sure I get the first question. x = ak + 11 y = ak + 21 x+y = ak + 4 How do you solve from here? 2ak +32 = ak + 4? What do "a" and "k" stand for?