This morning I took a GRE practice test and it made me feel old. It was a pretty interesting experience. We (=10 people or so) took it in a computer lab. I understand it's always taken on computers. The test has six sections.
1. Essay: You're given a choice of two prompts on hot-button, emotional issues. I did my essay on prisoners' rights - not something I get real worked up about, but I understand why some people do. Time: 45 minutes. Essay is graded on a scale of 0-6.
2. Second essay: You are given an argument and asked to deconstruct it, since it contains faulty assumptions. Here I had a problem: I'm fine with pointing out the flaws in arguments, but I don't require many words to do that. Time: 30 minutes. As before, essay is graded on a scale of 1-6.
3. Quantitative (=verbal) section: 30 multiple choice questions in 30 minutes. Antonyms, analogies, sentence completion, reading comp. Mostly pretty easy, although the analogies were pretty annoying. Analogies were the most difficult questions for me. Also, they don't give you directions for the antonym questions, so on the first one I put down the closest synonym to the word given. But I figured out the questions were asking for antonyms later on.
4. Qualitative (=math) section: 28 multiple choice questions in 45 minutes. This is pretty much the same as the SAT math section. I got some questions wrong because I didn't read the instructions carefully enough, so read those instructions!
5. Experimental section: We didn't do this, but it is on the real exam. Apparently it's another of sections 3 or 4, but you don't know which one is experimental and which one is not. Or something.
6. Research section: We didn't do this. Optional, doesn't count toward your score.
After the test there was a study session which I attended. Here's what I took away: The importance of the GRE varies from school to school, and it's not as important as the SAT. (latter = my inference) Some schools have minimum scores for acceptance or scholarship. A bit of talk about applying to grad school: requires personal statement (=essay), recommendation letters, and everything else you'd expect. As for taking grad school, what I've been hearing more and more is if you want to go to grad school, you should know why you want to go. You should be able to state it easily. This is especially true for Ph.D programs.
Maybe there will be a practice LSAT offered sometime. As for law school, I think I would like to go there, but there's one thing that concerns me...I thought of another career goal. I don't want to be evil. I don't want to be defending shitty corporate practices. I could, and maybe I could do it well, but I would not feel very happy with myself. And unfortunately, defending shitty corporate practices is probably the best way to make a fair amount of money. So who knows.
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Hmm, GRE, I need to take that. Would you say that doing a practice test was worth your while?
ReplyDelete(...did you switch qualitative and quantitative? o.o)
That's an awfully cynical view of lawyers you have there, so as somebody with more than a few lawyers in the family, I must object. XD It's not really fair to judge an entire profession based on the poor moral fiber of some portion of it.
p-static: Yeah, I switched qua(ln)titative. Oops. As for being cynical about lawyers, I don't see it that way. I'm not cynical about lawyers, I'm cynical about the folks they work for. It's the shitty corporate practices that I view as evil, and I should have made that more explicit. And, to be fair, corporate lawyers need jobs too. We all gotta eat.
ReplyDeleteIs taking a practice test worth your while? If you're going to grad school (and I suspect you are) then you'll prob'ly need to take it, I think. That being the case, I think you should take a practice test, just to be prepared.