rstr44

yevgeny, I don't know what this is like for your field, but I have the same issue in another field - political science. My gut feeling, although this must be qualified by my complete lack of knowledge about your field, is that it can't hurt. For (a) I don't know. At worst, I think it wouldn't make any difference. But it might also demonstrate that you have ambition, that you are going for the external scholarship. For (b) my feeling is that the program/university would probably make a decision about financial aid first, and then if you get an external scholarship, they might reduce it slightly. But I don't knwo for sure. The best way to find this information out is to ask the programs or universities themselves. Just call up the admissions contact for the departments or graduate schools and ask how this sort of thing is handled, hypothetically.

Yep, PhD. I started to look at Barron's word list, but ran out of time before I'd got through the A's. If you have time it would probably be very good, but it's very long, so I'd start by making a note of the ones you really don't know or aren't sure about, & studying those particularly. I also used the vocabulary builder at http://www.Number2.com and the list of 1160 GRE General Vocab here: http://www.uoregon.edu/~osmirnov/gre/ where I downloaded some free software (StudyWiz) to help practice that list - BUT BEWARE, I found a few mistakes in the definitions, so always good to look up any words you don't know in a dictionary. I liked that software though (you can do either virtual flash cards, tests with multiple choice of words or definitions, or just study the list of words), and found that if you're reasonably adept with computers you could open up the vocabulary lists as text files when the software wasn't open, and go in and edit them to add words, change definitions, correct spelling, etc, or even add new lists of your own. Otherwise, on verbal for both vocab and RC, just read as much as you can, and always look up any new words you find. Someone else on the forum recommended going to http://www.aldaily.com and reading articles linked there, and I think that's good advice:the articles it links are on a variety of subjects. It also contains links to major magazines - I'd suggest things like the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Prospect, Scientific American, New Republic, etc. Good luck, you guys (& gals)!

Thanks everybody! I'm planning to apply to political science; I have some ideas about programs but haven't made final decisions yet. I'll try to find my scores for the practice tests and post them on the other thread. Sighsigh, as for the verbal I tend to read A LOT so I think that helped there (and in the writing), and I also practiced some vocabulary lists that I downloaded off the web. Number2.com is a good site for that, and I found a couple of other websites with GRE word lists through Google. I’ve been practicing for about 2 months, on and off, but I ended up cramming in a lot of practice tests and math practice over the last few weeks, & I did extra practice in the last few days before the test. I had also done a bunch of practice tests a few years ago too, but then never applied, so I’d forgotten anything I learned then. Thanks again – this forum has been really helpful and supportive!

The sections went quantitative, verbal, quantitative. I don't know which one was experimental, but I thought the first one a little tougher, as I had to guess on a handful of questions I couldn't get my head around. Finished all sections. Although I must have been getting the more difficult questions, I didn't find them, in either verbal or math, to be any more difficult than what you get in the paper or Powerprep practice tests. Although clearly I can't discuss the specific content of the test, I don't remember being tested on anything not covered in the GRE math review, and the level of difficulty of ETS practice questions and tests and the real GRE was pretty similar. No writing scores yet. Thanks to everyone in the forum and esp those of you who provided practice math problems and solutions, for helping me to get my math head back on! UPDATE: I finally had to call the hotline to get my official scores, as I hadn't received them within a month. I know it's an international address, but geez, anybody ever heard of airmail?!? Anyway, good news, V&Q scores as above, and AWA of 6. This is good because the last part of my first essay was a bit unfinished: I was still editing the last para when the time ran out and had a few garbled bits at the end I was about to cut. Thanks TM for all your help - the math crowd in particular!

Mine's tomorrow! From ETS's info on the GRE CAT: "If you are running out of time at the end of a section, make every effort to complete the test. Data indicate that most test takers get higher scores if they finish the test. In fact, based on analyses of test takers, a majority of test takers will score higher if they finish the test than if they do not attempt to answer all of the questions. There is a chance that guessing at the end of the test can seriously lower your score. The best strategy is to pace yourself so that you have time to consider each test question, and won't have to guess. " So don't just guess to finish them, but yes, it's better to finish. The first time I took the PowerPrep test I got stuck on the math and didn't finish (can't remember how many unanswered, but maybe 8 or so). Even though I did quite well on the questions I had answered, my score was a lot lower than what I would have liked (I'd been scoring in mid to high 700s for math on the paper based practice tests, but got something like 650 or 660 the first time I did PP). I don't know exactly how much you're penalized, or even if there is a formula, but ETS says that you're scored on 1) the number you answer, 2) your performance on those you answer, taking account of difficulty level, etc. It's a good idea to review all this info at: http://www.gre.org/cbttest.html

Two different integers are to be selected from a set of 10 different integers, half of which are even and half of which are odd. How many of the 45 possible selections consist of one even and one odd integer? Answer choices: 5 10 20 23 25 This is how I tried to solve it. Can anyone advise me where I went wrong? For the first integer, you have a 5/10 probability (or 1/2) of picking an even integer; for the second, you have a 5 out of 9 probability of picking an odd integer (since one integer already chosen). So, I concluded that the answer should be (5/10)(5/9)(45) = (25/2), which clearly isn't correct. Any ideas?

you can ignore the 55 if you want to. It's the probability of getting one of the 3 major defects out of the 9 total defects, so 3/9 or 1/3 as the others rightly say!

The solution above is the simplest one, but you'd also get the right answer if you solved using P(A or B) = p(A) + p(B) - p(A and B) .95 + .90 - (.95)(.90) = .995

is there also maybe a simpler way to solve C? We know already that a white ball was drawn, so we're not interested in the probability of a white ball being drawn. There are three possible ways a white ball could be drawn; either of the two white balls in urn W could be drawn, or else the only white ball in urn B could be drawn. So the probability that the coin toss would have been heads is 2/3 or in other words, two of the 3 possible ways of getting a white ball involve getting heads in the coin toss.

can also solve by factoring, if it fits the way you think. 6= 2*3 10 = 2*5 So any number that has (at least) the factors 2*3*5 will be multiples of both 6 and 10 - the smallest number this could be is 30. 15 is the only one of the answer choices that MUST be a factor of (6*10) , because it's a multiple of 3 and 5.

Been thinking about part (b) again, and I think combinations ARE needed. So do you maybe multiply the probability of getting 7 questions right by the number of combinations of 7 out of 10 questions you could get right? So [(1/4)^7]*(10C7)? 10C7=120 or 1/2048 Ksan04, what's the answer?

The 4 choices are mutually exclusive in a multiple choice test (just like the questions in the GRE itself!). So there are only 4 ways of answering, not 15. In part b, we only need to get 7 answers right, not all 10. So you have to multiply together the probabilities of getting each of 7 answers correct. Actually now, it strikes me that my answer to part b is maybe not correct, because it might be necessary to take combinations into account before calculating probabilities..?? Argh, my brain hurts.

for Q1, the only thing you need to know about standard deviation to get this question right is that the narrower the range of responses (and thus the closer to the mean) the smaller the standard deviation. Standard deviation will always get larger as the range of responses gets wider. And as kfree rightly says, the standard deviation is a measure of distance from the mean. So standard deviation for, for example, the following made-up set of responses {0, 20, 25, 50, 65} will be greater than the standard deviation for {20, 22, 24, 30, 31}.

I don't think the question was naive. I had to look up how many primes there were below 100. This question could have stumped me if I'd got it on the test.

Q4 is slightly confusing on-screen. I'm assuming that with a1, etc. the 1 would be subscript in the actual question? Here it looks a bit like terms are being multiplied (e.g. an looks like a*n) The answer is 4n-3. a1 = 1 for the second term, a2 = a1 + 4 = 1+4 = 5 = 4*2-3 for the third, a3 = 5 + 4 = 9 = 4(3) -3 and so forth