teh GRE

[xorbie]

isura,

screw books. princeton review/kaplan/whatever else book with a title like "Verbal review".

[theben]

unless you go to great lengths, learning words isnt too helpful. if you learn 1K+, you are in good shape. if you learn just 150-200, it wont be very useful

figure out where you are going wrong in the GRE verbal. figure out if you are missing points of on the vocabl or reading. if your reading suffers greatly, you can troubleshoot that.

if your vocab sections are weak, then determine if it is your methods and thought process for solving and guessing or if it is a result of a shallow vocabulary

[redsoxsalty]

op,

i can tell you, straight up, that the gre means diddly squat if you're applying to phd programs. most programs don't even look at your scores (a philosophy program could care less about your quant. score), and many don't even require you to submit them. your coursework/grades, compatibility with faculty interests, and recs are far more important than the gre. start figuring out exactly what you're interested in, and start corresponding with faculty with matching interests. doing so will trump weak gre scores every time.

pm me if you have grad school app questions. i went through the process two years ago, and ended up at berkeley for a phd in history.

[vmacosta]

Ski,
You are in luck! The verbal GRE is the easiest standardized test to study for I know of. My good friend who can't spell and has a tiny vocab spent 1 month looking up words from old tests and practice test books and using flash cards to memorize. Doing just that he increased from 40th percentile to 95th (sorry can't remember what the raw score was, but that probably varies anyhow). Seriously, that's all he did.

[wooly_chicken]

[ QUOTE ]
op,

i can tell you, straight up, that the gre means diddly squat if you're applying to phd programs. most programs don't even look at your scores (a philosophy program could care less about your quant. score), and many don't even require you to submit them. your coursework/grades, compatibility with faculty interests, and recs are far more important than the gre. start figuring out exactly what you're interested in, and start corresponding with faculty with matching interests. doing so will trump weak gre scores every time.

pm me if you have grad school app questions. i went through the process two years ago, and ended up at berkeley for a phd in history.

[/ QUOTE ]

I remember there being a writing section on the GRE. I'd think that doing very poorly on that might hurt your chances of getting into a first tier school. I don't know about philosophy, but I know that it is true in math that they don't care about your general GRE scores (if you did really horribly on the qunatative, it might hurt you, but doing well won't help you).

Becoming a professor is really hard to do (I don't think a lot of people figure that out until they actually get to grad school).

[xorbie]

[ QUOTE ]
op,

i can tell you, straight up, that the gre means diddly squat if you're applying to phd programs. most programs don't even look at your scores (a philosophy program could care less about your quant. score), and many don't even require you to submit them. your coursework/grades, compatibility with faculty interests, and recs are far more important than the gre. start figuring out exactly what you're interested in, and start corresponding with faculty with matching interests. doing so will trump weak gre scores every time.

pm me if you have grad school app questions. i went through the process two years ago, and ended up at berkeley for a phd in history.

[/ QUOTE ]

this may be true for philosophy, but is patently untrue as a generalization. a lot of schools simply won't let you in without a good enough score.

[wooly_chicken]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
op,

i can tell you, straight up, that the gre means diddly squat if you're applying to phd programs. most programs don't even look at your scores (a philosophy program could care less about your quant. score), and many don't even require you to submit them. your coursework/grades, compatibility with faculty interests, and recs are far more important than the gre. start figuring out exactly what you're interested in, and start corresponding with faculty with matching interests. doing so will trump weak gre scores every time.

pm me if you have grad school app questions. i went through the process two years ago, and ended up at berkeley for a phd in history.

[/ QUOTE ]

this may be true for philosophy, but is patently untrue as a generalization. a lot of schools simply won't let you in without a good enough score.

[/ QUOTE ]

Some schools might have a cutoff where they basically won't even look at your application if your score isn't above the cutoff. I think it depends on the school and maybe even who is in charge of admissions that year at the school (e.g. the professor in charge of admissions at my school dislikes tests, so the GRE subject test is given very little weight)

[jthegreat]

[ QUOTE ]
Some schools might have a cutoff where they basically won't even look at your application if your score isn't above the cutoff.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is true, especially of the analytical writing section. I would imagine that a philosophy department would like to see a very, very good analytical writing score.

[redsoxsalty]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
op,

i can tell you, straight up, that the gre means diddly squat if you're applying to phd programs. most programs don't even look at your scores (a philosophy program could care less about your quant. score), and many don't even require you to submit them. your coursework/grades, compatibility with faculty interests, and recs are far more important than the gre. start figuring out exactly what you're interested in, and start corresponding with faculty with matching interests. doing so will trump weak gre scores every time.

pm me if you have grad school app questions. i went through the process two years ago, and ended up at berkeley for a phd in history.

[/ QUOTE ]

this may be true for philosophy, but is patently untrue as a generalization. a lot of schools simply won't let you in without a good enough score.

[/ QUOTE ]

wrong. i know quite a few grad students at berkeley who have trash gre scores. in fact, my quant score was horrific, and several top phd programs admitted me.

as for the writing section, it's more important than the other test sections, but most programs will request a 20 page writing sample and place much more emphasis on that.

edit: when i say trash, i mean in the high 500s/low 600s, although i think this is still close to 80th percentile for verbal. my ultimate point is that the gre is the least important of all of your application's components, UNLIKE the lsat or mcat.