>I took the GRE on Monday. For those who don’t know – it’s a test, kind of the SAT for grad school. I’ve been planning this for awhile, so awhile back I got myself a copy of the Princeton Review’s Cracking the GRE. And once I scheduled my test date the studying began.
For the verbal section of the test it’s all about knowledge of words. I read a lot, but the words on this test were something else. I decided to bank on doing well with sentence completion and reading comprehension, and do what I could with analogies and antonyms. Lucky for me, there are some great strategies for finding the right answer even if you have no clue what the word means.
The purpose of the blog though is the math section, or quantitative section if I want to be really correct about it. As the Princeton Review puts it – most people don’t take much math in college so the GRE tests only basic math or what you would learn in 8th or 9th grade. The study book actually says that SAT math is more difficult. GRE math is simple algebra, geometry, and understanding numbers. A lot of the math looks crazy…until you break it down. Then it’s really just canceling things out and knowing when multiplying or dviding by a negative number is negtive or positive. Stuff like that.
So I want to say, Thank you Mrs. Cummins. While studying 8th grade math class came flooding back to my brain. Perfect squares, decimal form of fractions 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6…etc…, how to perform operations with negative numbers, the formulas for finding areas of triangles and circles. So many math facts lurking in my brain.
I guess all that math I thought I’d never use again really did come in handy.
And now I am applying to graduate programs where I will hopefully be doing lots of reasearch that will involve data anaylsis and statistics. Much harder than 8th grade math class.