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Passing the GRE Test is one of the important criteria required to gain admission to universities abroad in order to further one’s studies.
Thousands of students around the world actively seek education opportunities in English-speaking universities.
Some have the money to fund their international ambitions while others look for scholarships by schools and organisations. If you fall among one of these groups, then this article is for you.
There are two obstacles preventing many from studying abroad: Money and educational qualifications. How to overcome these obstacles vary by individual and location. This article will focus on a part of the educational qualification requirement for all courses delivered in English – PASSING THE GRE Test (Graduate Record Examination Test).
To study in any school, a student must understand and communicate effectively in the language of that school. There may be other requirements in addition to language proficiency, but communication skill is a must. To this end, several organizations have emerged to provide training and certification in a particular language and or skill, while others organize and conduct tests to help schools, organizations and individuals determine the level of preparedness of candidates applying for studies, scholarships, or employment. One such certification is the GRE Test which measures a range of skills that are critical to success in graduate education.
This article will discuss the GRE Test, including registration and preparatory guide, and provide useful pointers to practising and practice resources for the test. If you are considering taking an English proficiency test which will prove to any university, organisation or employer that you are capable of reasoning and communicating in the English language, then this article deserves a read.
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The GRE Test was established in 1936 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. It is owned and managed by the Education Testing Service (ETS). The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is designed to help graduate schools and other schools, including business and law schools, evaluate applicants on a range of skills including English language proficiency and reasoning.
The GRE Test has become popular with both students and schools, with universities across the US and Canada making it an admission requirement. Many schools and organizations also make it a requirement for scholarship awards.
GRE Test is now administered at a global level, with over 1000 test centres in many countries. Its reputation and quality have made GRE scores accepted to supplement undergraduate records, recommendation letters and other qualifications for graduate-level study. The fairness and transparency with which it selects test materials, designs test questions and conducts and grades the exam, is one of the major reasons that students all over the world register for the test.
It does provide a range of other services like sending your test score to a school, making it easy for schools to verify a particular score, and providing a search service for schools looking to recruit students within a certain score range for programs.
To study in any English-speaking school, or to take any course in English, you are to understand and be able to communicate in English effectively in both oral and written form. Every university you apply to will require proof of English language proficiency. One of such major proof accepted by universities worldwide is the GRE Test results – particularly for MBA, specialized master’s and doctoral programs.
To make it easier to choose which school to study at, GRE provides a complete list of schools that accept GRE test scores by country. GRE becomes even more important if you are looking to study at a business or law school.
Scholarship organizations too require English language proficiency proof before you can have a scholarship to study any course delivered in English. In most cases, you will need to provide this proof before you start the application process. For this reason, it follows that a GRE Test score will be really useful to anyone aspiring to study at any English university, especially international students. Having a good GRE Test will make it a lot easier for you to study courses in English anywhere in the world, and you can use the result for years to come.
There aren’t any GRE scholarships given for obtaining a particular score. However, most graduate schools have some kind of scholarship opportunities for students that will require a high GRE score. Applying to these schools with a high GRE score will greatly increase your chances against other applicants.
Before we outline the details of registration, it is important to know what you need to have before registering. The most important document for the GRE test is your ID.
DOCUMENT REQUIREMENT
Your ID must be valid and acceptable. Meaning it should not expire before the exam date, and should be in good shape and legible. Your ID name must also match the name on your registration (excluding accents). If one of these requirements is unmet, you will be denied entry to the test, or if you manage to crawl through, your score will be cancelled. Your first and last name must appear exactly as it appears on your ID. You have the option to include your middle name, but this is not a requirement. You won’t be allowed to use a supplemental ID to resolve discrepancies in name. If you have any questions or are in doubt regarding name discrepancies, you are to contact TSReturns@ets.org before submitting a registration.
Your ID requirement will also depend on your citizenship and the country in which you intend to take the test. You can see the full ID requirement for a particular country by visiting this link. Select your country from the list in the combo box and check the requirement displayed below.
You may not use ID on your phone or other electronic devices, or a photocopy. The ID must be government issued by the national, state or province in which you are a citizen or legal resident. Also, make sure the photo on your ID is recent and recognizable. For example, you cannot use a primary-school-era passport or one you took long ago. The ID should include your signature which must match the name. There are a few exceptions to these requirements so before giving up the validity of your ID; you may need to contact GRE for clarification. Use the email provided earlier for any ID-related issues.
You can be excused in certain circumstances for not meeting ID requirements. For example, if you are living in asylum, have refugee status or for some justifiable reason cannot provide an acceptable identification document, you must contact the ETS Office of Testing Integrity (OTI) at least no later than 7 days before registering to test. You must have approval from OTI before you register. OTI may request certain documents from you before giving approval. If you fail to reach out in advance and you are proceed to take the test, your score will be withheld with no refunds.
Verification before the start of testing may involve:
If you are uncooperative during verification you may be prevented from taking the test without being refunded on the test fee.
If you have any disabilities and want to request certain services, or must use certain items that otherwise won’t be allowed, you must first request accommodation for that disability. When you have approval from the GRE disability service you can proceed to register.
GRE has made arrangements for most disabilities a test taker might have. There will be accommodations (special arrangements) for test takers who meet the disability requirements. To request for disability accommodation, simply download and follow this guide.
To register for the computer-delivered GRE test go to the registration page and hit the “Create an Account” button. The online form is pretty straightforward. Just fill in your information accurately and make sure the Name matches your ID document. Any field marked with an asterisk is mandatory. Check the small box to give your consent, and then click “Next” at the bottom right of the page.
Select a username and password. Your security question and answer should be something you can remember. Read the acknowledgement document if you feel like it. Again, check the small box for your acknowledgement and click “Next”.
Your personal information is displayed for review. You cannot change your Name, Date of Birth, Gender, and SSN once you hit “Submit”. Go over your details thoroughly for accuracy before submitting your application. On successful submission, you may log in to continue with the registration.
On the homepage under “My Tests” hit the blue button. What comes next can be a little confusing, so pay close attention.
Select a test, in this case, GRE General Test. In the next field, type the name of a location to find a test centre near you. You can input a country or city name. Finally, on this page, you’ll pick a date range within which a test is available for centres at your location. The date range can be changed by using the blue arrow in front of the current date range. Proceed to find the available dates and centres.
You are viewing a page that shows a calendar and Google map side-by-side. Available test dates are displayed on the calendar and highlighted in green. Click on any highlighted date to view full information about the centre. Alternatively, you can click on test dates listed just under the calendar to view information about each centre. Note that centre details do not indicate the Test Time. Test time must appear before you can register at that centre. Select “Show Test Times”. The page will update and display centre details, but this time, with the Test Time and a “Register” option. Click “Register”.
Read the information on this page thoroughly and then check the “I agree” box and then “Next”. The following page displays your complete personal information with an option to “Edit”. Click “Next” to proceed.
Choose whether to opt in for the GRE Search Service and then “Next”. Fill in the form on the succeeding page and select “Next” to proceed. You are landed on a page advertising different practice materials, some for free, but others will cost up to $40. Check the boxes under the “Select” column to add products, and click on the “Checkout” button. Payment is done on the next page.
The product will be shipped to the address you provided and you can choose a shipping method. The faster the more expensive. Proceed to pay using PayPal, cards, or other methods available to you. The test registration fee as of October 31st 2019 is $220.00
On successful checkout, you will see an order confirmation message with helpful tips on how to access the products you just bought.
PREPARATORY GUIDE
You must prepare before stepping into any exam hall, otherwise, you will need a miracle to succeed, unless you cheat, which is next to impossible with the GRE test. The best way to prepare for any test or exam is to have full knowledge of what is expected of you by the examiner. This will guide you to read the right topics just like a syllabus does. Because there is no official syllabus for the GRE test, we have condensed many of the areas of concentration in this section of the article. So read attentively.
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This test is delivered in sections. Each section is fairly explained below.
The passages are pulled from a number of disciplines and sources. They will feature topics from physical science, biological sciences, social science, arts and humanities, and topics of general concern. Each passage is presented in such a context as to be understood by the general public. Passages will have a level of complexity similar to that encountered in the university, adapted from books and periodicals both academic and non-academic. The aim of which is to assess your ability to:
The questions will come in different shapes which we will summarize below. About half of the measure requires that you read passages and answer questions about those passages. The remaining questions will ask you to read, interpret and complete existing sentences, groups of sentences or paragraphs.
The verbal reasoning question types include Reading Comprehension, Text Completion, and Sentence Equivalence. We will briefly describe each question type.
Reading Comprehension questions will test a wide range of skills that you need in order to understand the kind of text encountered in universities. Such skills like:
For GRE tests, reading and understanding a passage requires far more than a passive assimilation of words and sentences it contains. You should learn to actively engage with the text by asking questions, evaluating and formulating hypotheses, and identifying relationships between texts and pieces of information therein.
Questions will come from a body of text containing one or more paragraphs. There are 10 passages with mostly one paragraph. Passages have to do with social, physical, or biological sciences, arts and humanities, and business from materials found in books, periodicals, and other academic and non-academic sources.
While doing your reading practice, it is very important to carefully analyze the text and look out for the clues that will help you to understand less explicit aspects of the passage. Keep an eye out for such a clue as:
Make sure that every answer you give draws from the information presented in the passage. Do not draw from your prior knowledge even if the information conflicts with your opinion or knowledge on a topic.
Because passages are drawn from a wide variety of disciplines, you should expect to encounter materials with which you are not familiar. You should also not expect to agree with everything you see in a passage. However, all questions will not require any prior knowledge to answer. The answers can be deduced right from the passages and provided you do understand the passages to minute details, you will pass the test. So while preparing for the test, it will be unnecessary to acquire knowledge on specific subjects that are likely to feature in the passages. This is not to say that you shouldn’t do any reading at all. In fact, you should. Many successful test takers benefited by gaining more exposure to GRE-level reading material.
The best approach to getting familiar with test materials is to practice the kind of logical reasoning and rhetorical patterns typically found in GRE reading passages. Read a wide variety of text that entails similar features as the ones in the GRE reading passage. Read regularly or at least for a considerable length of time prior to the test. The question you may be asking is, “What kind of text should I read, and where do I find them”?
Some think that the graduate-level prose sampled by GRE can only be found in highly specialized academic journals or databases. Quite to the contrary, practice reading materials are available on numerous sources free of charge. You can read articles on news sites like The New York Times, The Guardia, or The Wall Street Journal Asia. You may also read periodicals like The Economist, Scientific American and London Review of Books, trade books by experts and journalists for the general public, sample academic prose, and others.
Read widely and critically analyze any text particularly those that are rich in meaning. In short to succeed in the GRE verbal reasoning, how you read is as important as what you read.
Multiple-choice question – select only one answer: these are traditional multiple-choice questions to which you will select only one answer. To answer this type of question correctly, follow the tips given below:
Multiple-choice question – select one or more answers: you will be given three answer choices for these questions. One, two, or all three answers will be correct. To gain any marks for these questions, you must select all correct answers and only those. Otherwise, you will score zero for it. Follow the below tips to answer questions.
Select-in-Passage: these questions only appear in the computer-based testing. You are typically asked to select the sentence in a passage that meets a certain description. You will be limited to a specific paragraph or body of text. The best approach to answering these questions is below.
Text Completion Questions: this question type is intended to test your ability to absorb, evaluate, and interpret information as you read. Certain crucial words will be omitted from a passage and you are asked to use the remaining information in the passage as a basis to fill in the blanks to form a coherent, meaningful whole. To answer these questions correctly, you should do the following:
Sentence Equivalence Questions: Like Text Completion questions, Sentence Equivalence questions test the ability to reach a conclusion about how a passage should be completed on the basis of partial information, but to a greater extent they focus on the meaning of the completed whole. Sentence Equivalence questions consist of a single sentence with just one blank, and they ask you to find two choices that lead to a complete, coherent sentence while producing sentences that mean the same thing.
Do not simply look among the answer choices for two words that mean the same thing. This can be misleading for two reasons. First, the answer choices may contain pairs of words that mean the same thing but do not fit coherently into the sentence. Second, the pair of words that do constitute the correct answer may not mean exactly the same thing, since all that matters is that the resultant sentences mean the same thing.
Follow these tips while answering the questions:
Having registered for the GRE test, you don’t just sit down and wait for the date. Even if you are confident in your knowledge or have taken a GRE test before, it will still be helpful to go through some important contents of the test material. Not just that, you will also benefit a lot from practising these materials.
The Analytical Writing section measures your ability in a number of skills including:
You are to provide a focused response based on the task you are given. This way they can assess your ability to respond directly to problems.
This section contains two separate analytical writing tasks: an Analyze an Issue tasks, and Analyze an Argument task.
This section gives you a general view of the type of questions to expect in the Analytical Writing section, general advice, a scoring guide and tips for answering questions more effectively.
Your assessments depend on your ability to think critically about a topic and then clearly express your thought in writing. Issue statements will make a claim that you are asked to discuss from various viewpoints as applicable to different situations. For example, you are given a claim like one of the following:
The example questions and instructions are the latest samples on the official website of GRE Test organizers. You will find links to materials to practice
Each claim is accompanied by a set of instructions which may include at least one of the concepts described below:
This part will check how well you can understand, analyze and evaluate an argument, and the clarity with which you express this evaluation in writing. Normally, you are given a small passage in which the author builds an argument for a cause of action, or the author interprets an event by making claims backed by reason, evidence or facts. Your task will be to discuss how logical the author’s case is according to specific instructions. To do this you will critically examine the line of reasoning and use of evidence by the author. For such passages, you will be given one of the following instructions:
This section of the test measures your abilities such as:
For those taking this test using a computer, there will be an on-screen calculator to use. The paper-based testers will be given a calculator at the test centre.
The Quantitative Reasoning section includes an on-screen calculator. If you are taking the paper-delivered test, a calculator will be provided at the test centre.
There are four types of questions in this section
Questions can appear independently as a discrete question or as part of a set called a Data Interpretation set. Data Interpretation set questions are drawn from the same data presented in tables, graphs or other forms of infographic. There are a number of distinct kinds of questions. These are the question types you should expect to see in the Quantitative Reasoning section:
Some questions focus on a real-world setting, while others will appear in a purely mathematical setting. A good number of the questions are “word problems” which you must interpret and model mathematically. To do well in this section, you must have a good knowledge of some mathematical concepts and methods as mapped out below:
Topics will not be more complex than anything you should expect in a high-school classroom. All mathematical symbols and terminology used are those of high school.
There are resources that highlight useful strategies for answering questions in this section. You can access it here.
ScoreItNow!™ Online Writing Practice Service for the GRE® General Test
The ScoreItNow!™ Online Writing Practice service is a web-based tool designed to help you sharpen your analytical writing skills in preparation for the Analytical Writing section of the GRE General Test. The automated scoring system uses GRE’s patented e-rater® technology to provide scores immediately for essays, in a confidential and safe environment.
Although performance on ScoreItNowessay topics is not a conclusive predictor of your test score, you are encouraged the write the essay responses under timed conditions to get a better idea of how prepared you are for the actual test.
Using this service, you will be able to:
The fee for the ScoreItNow! Online Writing Practice service is US$20, and entitles you to write two essay responses and receive an e-rater score for each. Plus, new bonus topics are also available: after you have submitted two essay responses for scoring, you will have the additional option to write and submit essay responses on six FREE bonus topics (three for the Analyze an Issue task and three for the Analyze an Argument task) for more practice. You will receive a score on each essay response that you submit on these bonus topics.
As most tests are conducted using a computer, it helps to get familiar with the computer-based set-up. You can use POWERPREP® Online for TWO FREE practice tests. Each one simulates the actual test, making you learn important features like navigating between questions, onscreen calculator, changing answers within a section, and much more.
To access more online practice resources for the GRE General test, visit this link. There are several materials to practice on, and you will find enough on the page.