GRE - Tips and Advice

[keenan87]

It's about that time in my academic career where I need to start thinking about the GRE in order to enter the graduate program in clinical psychology. I am planning on taking the test next summer before hopefully entering graduate school in two years (Fall 2014).

I have done a lot of switching around during my first three years at the University of Calgary and have now really enjoyed psychology and would like to eventually get my pHD in clinical psychology.

My question to the CP world is, where should I begin to study?

Personally, I am fairly strong with mathematics but not very strong with the verbal portion of the exam.

Are there any books, websites or any other material that can Ube very useful and efficiently priced? Is there a strategy that I should employ? I have read that learning new words is very helpful for the verbal portion and found the following two websites:

http://majortests.com/gre/wordlist.php
http://www.studybeans.com/gre/vocab_list.html

I would like to learn around 3500 words for the exam and I hope 12 months is a sufficient amount of time.

What type of scores should I be aiming for (preparing for the general one only)? I know for psychology, more emphasis should be put on the verbal and analytic portions. I will be applying with hopefully a 3.70 GPA in my last 20 courses (all schools in Canada only look at the previous 20 courses). I have already been assisting two professors with their research and plan on volunteering at the hospital. Three options for schools that I am looking at are U of C, Queens and U of Vic.

Thanks in advance for all of the help!

[Ashartus]

It was a really long time ago that I wrote it, but I found the best preparation for the general exam was going through old practice exams. Unless it has changed a lot in recent years (I wrote it around 1994 I believe), the questions generally test thinking ability more than knowledge, and getting a feel for the type of questions on the exam is helpful. I didn't do anything specific to learn new words for the vocabulary test, but I was a pretty heavy reader and had a pretty good vocabulary to start with. I'm not sure how much value there is in memorizing definitions for a list of words unless they keep re-using the same words; I think reading a lot (particularly by authors who are masters of the language) to increase your exposure to vocabulary in general might be a better way, albeit one that takes time. Even if you don't know the exact definitions of words, if you have some familiarity with the context they're used in you can usually figure out the right answer from the choices given.

[keenan87]

Thanks, I might start doing some reading now as it seems like a very good idea