A few months back, the New York Times published this fascinating article on the subject of decision fatigue. The article became a big topic of conversation here in the Manhattan GRE office. If you don’t have time to read the full article, I will give a quick summary: the more decisions a human makes in a row, the less will-power that person will have after each successive decision—this phenomenon is called decision fatigue (note: this is a vast oversimplification of the article, so you should give it a read if you have time). The test subjects weren’t asked to make big decisions—no marriage proposals, no career changes, no forced choice between Kirk and Picard—just simple everyday choices, such as what color of china they would prefer, or what specifications they would like in a new computer. The study found that making decisions, even small inconsequential ones, can significantly deplete a person’s willpower.

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Come GRE test day, there isn’t much left to do in the way of studying. Cramming new material on the day of your exam is stressful and won’t give you much of a positive return on time invested. However, there are some things that you can do on test day to further your GRE success. One thing that I found very useful when I took my GRE was performing a math warm-up. Read more

As we’ve mentioned before, the GRE testing center can be a stressful place. Showing up for the GRE is much like arriving at the airport. You will have to empty your pockets, present a photo ID, and maybe even go through a metal detector. Sometimes, students make the mistake of preparing for the test content without ever considering the test experience. To help you prepare for the full experience, we’ve put together this list of testing center dos and don’ts.

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Yesterday, Study Hacks pointed us to a Reddit thread titled I’m not as smart as I thought I was. In the initial post, a Redditor was concerned that poor standardized test scores had revealed he was really not that intelligent, and would keep him out of MIT. The responses came in vast numbers, and many of them crystallized around a unifying theme: academic success doesn’t depend solely on smarts but rather requires hard work and dedication.

We sometimes encounter student with similar concerns. Some students become dejected after struggling with an initial practice GRE, and start to feel that they just aren’t smart enough to succeed on the exam. And we’re here to say STOP! Don’t get discouraged. The GRE is not The Sorting Hat; it does not magically divine your intelligence and then dictate your academic future.

“130 Quant and 130 Verbal? Hufflepuff.”

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So, you made your New Year’s resolutions based on the fact that you are currently reading a GRE blog, I’m guessing that one of yours involved applying to graduate school. Let me be the first to say, excellent decision! Now what do you do?

I’ve looked at a number of online Graduate School Application Timelines, from a number of different sources, and one thing that nearly every timeline suggests, is a starting date that falls between May and September BUT WAIT! Don’t stop reading.

Yes, you could spend the next five months slogging through your Netflix instant queue waiting for those calendars to start, and you would still be able to complete you applications. However, I would recommend starting now by knocking out the GRE, and here is why.

1. Less to worry about in the fall

My biggest complaint about timelines that suggest a May-September start date is that they place Take the GRE on a single day in October. Most people, however, will spend more than one day on the GRE. Here at Manhattan GRE we recommend that students spend roughly three months on their preparation, but even students with a modest study plan will usually set aside two or three weeks to take some GRE practice tests and review their areas of weakness. Now, imagine these 2-10 weeks overlapping with the time you spend writing personals statements, requesting letters of recommendation, and refining your application. It sounds needlessly overwhelming.

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As 2011 draws to a close, we thought it best to take a look back at the year. 2011 was a big year here at Manhattan GRE. On August, 1st the Revised GRE came out, and in preparation for that change we released our 2nd edition strategy guides. We also revamped our website and unveiled a new logo. With all of these changes going on we got a lot more student questions than normal, so I thought I’d recap some of the questions our students asked most often this past year.

1. What is the new 1000?

On the old GRE scale (400-1600) the score of 1000 was commonly thrown around as a cutoff score below which your chances of graduate school acceptance were severely impeded. Based on our research this score cutoff was something of a myth, but it was very widely believed. Sure, certain schools asked for it, but in reality, 1000 just sounded like a nice number and didn’t really say much about an applicant’s ability level. (For instance, a perfect 800 quant score and the worst possible verbal score of 200 added up to 1000, the same way two 500s do, but those candidates would be extremely different.)

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With most grad school applications due sometime between December and January, we hear about a lot of students who have to take the GRE soon after Thanksgiving weekend. I’m sure that a number of you reading this will have to spend your precious holiday break poring over GRE practice materials, only breaking to pour gravy over your Thanksgiving feast.

WARNING: Do not confuse poring with pouring

To help you with your studies we have come up with the three key tips for holiday studying (four if you count the sagacious caption above).

1.) Read the Recipes Aloud to the Chef

This is not just a ploy to force you to help in the kitchen, we swear. If you are lucky enough to have someone cooking for you, and they don’t mind having another body in their kitchen during prep time, offer to help read them the recipes they are using and to help measure out ingredients. A lot of the GRE word problems involve skills that are similar to recipe reading (manipulating numbers that are pulled out of a passage of text). Also, the simple numbers involved in recipe measurements are similar to the simple arithmetic that many GRE quant problems demand. The time spent adding, subtracting, and measuring food will help you hone your speed and comfort with simple calculations for the GRE.
GRE Quant? No big deal.

2.) Study Early on Thanksgiving

In a previous post we talked about how diet can impact your ability to retain information. While a Thanksgiving splurge isn’t going to derail your study ability long term, people often spend Thanksgiving consuming large amounts of food and possibly imbibing some alcohol. Whatever your holiday routine, you are probably going to be more able to study on Thanksgiving morning than you will be after your sixth slice of pumpkin pie. Instead of watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade, try to fit in your studying early so that you can spend the afternoon stuffing yourself with yams.

3.) Don’t Overdo It

The key to successful holiday studies might just be to take it easy. Studying on the holidays is a good idea, but we’d suggest that you try to follow your normal study patterns. Just as taking a few days off for the holidays would be a waste of study time, using the time off to cram could burn you out. Try to pretend that the holiday break is just a normal weekend, and study accordingly. I know that Thanksgiving is usually not a time for moderation, but try to allow your even-keeled study habits to act as a temperate middle ground between for your gluttonous eating and your post-feast state of torpor.

Pictured: the antonym of moderation

In closing, we advise that you do some studying in the morning, then help measure out flour in the kitchen, and after that, leave your books alone for the rest of the day. After all, the Cowboys are playing the Dolphins this Thanksgiving, and we all know that one of the most important lessons ever taught on Thanksgiving was when Leon Lett showed us all that it is sometimes best to just leave it alone.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

We recently read a great article over at Gradhacker titled: Gaming Grad School. This article analyzes the question that plagues us all: why do we find it so easy to spend 14 straight hours launching plasma grenades at aliens (or birds at pigs, or batarangs at clowns, or Tetris blocks at other Tetris blocks), but so hard to spend the same amount of time on our studies?

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This article from the Wall Street Journal analyzes the best and worst conditions in which you can study for tests, which got us thinking about how study practices can impact test scores. It makes sense that certain environmental factors can be detrimental to your studies. In college, I always found it difficult to study during neighbor’s marathon dubstep spinning sessions. Right now, I am writing this post in between bites of falafel, while listening to Super Bass on repeat, after I night where I lost about 4 hours of sleep in order to stay up and play Batman: Arkham City “ clearly, I am in no state to be studying for a test. But common sense alone won’t provide you with the perfect study setup.

I know many of you don’t want to tear yourselves away from your GRE flashcards for long enough to read that link, so here are the highlights.

Food

Your brain, like most of your other vital organs, needs nutrients to run. During the GRE, your brain will be running a marathon, so you need to carbo-load for your mind “ and not just on test day. The Wall Street Journal suggests that for a full week before the test you should stop freebasing pixie stix (our advice, not theirs) and instead eat a diet of high-carb, high-fiber, slow digesting foods like oatmeal. Keep an eye out for a post, coming to our blog soon, with a full analysis of the role food and nutrition play in test taking.

Music

Turn the stereo off while studying. Years of baby Mozart and Tom Lehrer have taught us the joys of musical learning. But, while listening to GWAR’s greatest hits might make you more relaxed, it will also make it harder for you to remember everything that you review. I can personally attest to this; my GRE scores improved dramatically when I started practice testing under real conditions without music. I used to run my vocab lists while listening to music, but I had a lot of difficult keeping lyrics out of my head when I was trying to commit definitions to memory. Also, I had a lot of trouble pacing myself on practice tests when I was listening to tunes I think music does strange things to the space time continuum.

Sleep

It is a given that you should get plenty of sleep on the night before the test, but you should also try to line up your study schedule so that you are learning right before you go to bed. The things that you think about right before you go to sleep are easier to recall later on.

Practice

Studying helps, but only if you are actively learning. Don’t just read through your flashcards, actually test yourself to recall the information before you flip a card over and check yourself. Repetition helps too.

These tips will help you maximize the benefit of your studies, but you still need to put in the hours. Oatmeal alone will not allow you to ace the GRE. When it comes right down to it, you have to learn the material. Now stop reading this and go run your flashcards one more time.

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Scores from August administrations of the Revised GRE are now available online!

A few days ago, we reported that ETS had started to convert Old GRE scores to the new scale and we started to speculate about when the new scores would arrive. Apparently, they were right around the corner.
Yesterday, ETS released a table containing the percentile ranks for the new scale. Today, they followed up by releasing the first batch of Revised GRE scores nearly a week ahead of schedule. But what does it all mean?

1. The percentiles make more sense – ETS has done a pretty good job of pinning the 50th percentile right around the middle of the score range at roughly 151 for Verbal and 149 for Quant. From there, the scores are roughly patterned after a normal distribution. The extremely skewed percentiles of the old GRE are a thing of the past.
2. Verbal is still the tougher section of the two, but the math is harder than it used to be – The high end of the verbal scale still indicates that Verbal is the more challenging of the two sections; either a 169 or 170 on Verbal will land in you in the 99th percentile, while only a perfect 170 will do so for quant. However, the math is no cakewalk. A perfect score on the old GRE would land you only a 166 on the new scale. ETS has made good on its promise to make the math more difficult (this will help them challenge the GMAT in terms of B-School relevance).
3. 750-800 Math estimates can end up all over the place – 750-800 was the best quant estimate that you could get on the revised GRE, but today that range can mean a score as low as the 85 percentile (based on scores we have heard so far). The fact that a range of 6 score values on the old test (750, 760, 770, 780, 790, 800) translates to at least 10 different score values on the new test (162, 163, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170) shows just how out of whack the old quant scale was. Unfortunately, it also means that receiving a 750-800 estimate on your quant doesn’t tell you much about what your official score will actually be.

These are our big takeaways from today’s data. It is still a small sample and we will no doubt be updating you as further information trickles in. As I have previously mentioned, Manhattan GRE will be in attendance at the ETS score explanation webinars coming up in two weeks. We will be sure to report everything that we learn there as soon as we learn it. If you’d like to share what your scores estimates turned into today, please email us at studentservices@manhattanprep.com/gre/.