Grad school is kicking my butt. So in an effort to keep this blog semi-active over the next few months, until I at least get my legs underneath me to start generating new content, I'll be recycling many of my old posts about the MFA application process. This information is a year old, but I think still very relevant for the upcoming 2009 application season. This post was put up on October 18, 2008. It covers my brief and neurotic thoughts on the art of recommendations. Specifically, why you should use physical letters of recommendations over electronic ones. Though I'm sure that emailed recommendations are perfectly fine, too. Enjoy!
My recommendation materials have been, to quote Stevie Wonder, "signed, sealed, and delivered" to my recommendors and I feel great. You'd think that such a thing would be a simple enough affair -- ask your three people to write you some letters -- but as I found out in my research, recommendations, if done properly and on time, are a complicated affair. Can you accommodate the timeline of all of your recommendors? What level of involvement should you have with your recommendors? But out of all the questions I had to answer, the one that was the far most difficult to answer was whether I wanted to send the materials to my recommendors by paper or email.
You might notice that nowadays most major schools encourage their applicants to use their online applications. And in general, this is a great idea, for both the school and the applicant. There's little to no paper or ink used, the computerized applications have a far less likely hood of being lost or delayed, etc. These schools even extend their online capabilities to recommendations. It seems simple enough. Just enter your recommendor's information into an online form, and the school's system will email them instructions on how to upload their letters online. Maybe even answer a couple questions. No muss, no fuss, right? Maybe. When I sat down and really thought about what was being asked of each of my recommendors, I began to realize how daunting the process was going to be. I'm applying to fourteen schools -- which means fourteen customized letters, fourteen cover sheets, fourteen different forms or general questions each school is asking. And while it would seem easy enough to put that into email terms -- electronic forms are easier to handle than paper ones, right? -- several problems rear their heads. For starters, if my email inbox is any indication of how most people keep and organize their emails, then I couldn't realistically expect my recommendors to keep track of each of the fourteen emails the schools would be sending them. Plus, we'd be talking about fourteen emails in the span of 1-2 hours (logging into a school's account and filling out all 3 recommendors' information takes at least 5-10 minutes each), not all at once. If I'm sending emails to someone's account over the span of 1-2 hours, then we'd be talking about fourteen emails intermixed with perhaps a dozen or so other personal emails. And on top of all that consider this note, which is a warning that some schools, like Notre Dame and the University of Indiana, put during their email submission process: Please note that notification emails will indicate "University of Notre Dame - the Graduate School" as the sender but will come from support@ApplyYourself.com. If they use a spam-blocking tool, please ask them to add this email address to their list of known/safe addresses. What? Spam-blockers? What kind of email account doesn't have some form of spam blocking software in this day and age? The opportunities for an email or two slipping through the cracks are simply too great.
I understand that at this point, I probably sound like a raving paranoid lunatic, but consider this: Whose job is it to make the process as simple and easy as possible? Whose job is it to make sure all the letters are received and sent on time without fuss? If a school or two falls through the cracks, who's going to worry about it -- you or the recommendor? Certainly, if your recommendor is a decent human being -- and they all are, or we wouldn't ask them to write us words of praise -- then they might ask about where this or that school's email went, but would you really expect them to look out for your big picture? At the end of the day, you are your own greatest advocate. It's as simple as that. And if you don't do the dirty work, if you don't follow up and make sure that what needs to be done actually gets done, then no one else will.
Which is why I decided to go low-tech and send out the letters by paper. One big package, with all fourteen envelopes and the correct cover letters, and one big manila envelope inside for them to mail the entire thing back to me when they're done. And when I get them back, I'll know exactly where they're going and when, and if something goes wrong, it'll be because I didn't do something right. Am I a control freak? Most certainly. But I'd rather put it in my hands than someone else's.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Recycled: GRE Thoughts, Part 2
Grad school is kicking my butt. So in an effort to keep this blog semi-active over the next few months, until I at least get my legs underneath me to start generating new content, I'll be recycling many of my old posts about the MFA application process. This information is a year old, but I think still very relevant for the upcoming 2009 application season. This post was put up on October 10, 2008, and is my second post on GREs, how they relate to MFA programs, some general thoughts, and preparation. Enjoy!
Welcome to my random thoughts on the GREs, part two. Part one can be found here. It occurred to me yesterday that I needed to give a little more background to where I'm coming from educationally to give a little bit more perspective on my scores. I graduated from college four years ago from Purdue with a degree in Genetics with a horrible 2.46 GPA. Suffice to say that I have never been a very hard worker. But I've always been a pretty good standardized tester. In the month leading up to my test on September 13, I first took a baseline practice test just to see how badly my verbal skills had declined in college and got a 500-550 score. Following that, I studied semi-regularly on the weekends, taking practice tests, memorizing words. When I was about a week out before the real thing, I went into "hardcore" mode and studied nonstop using the strategies I outlined in my GRE thoughts, part one. Additionally, I did some very light studying on the math and essay sections.
On to the various websites and resources, as promised in my previous post.
Barron's GRE Guide -- This was the first thing I bought in preparation for the test, and was my base resource. It's basically everything you'd expect from a GRE guidebook -- complete with five paper practice tests, one CAT test (on a CD), general study strategies, a "most frequent word" list (weighing in at 333 words), and a much more massive 3,500-word list. To be honest, I have no idea why the 3,500-word list was in there. Unless you buy this book a year to six months outside of the test, there's no way anyone would be able to reliably memorize all those words. And even then, it's not going to cover all the possible words you would potentially see on the test. Simply put, the best way to get that tasty 700+ GRE score is to be generally well read -- something that comes from decades of reading regularly. For the more realistic studier, the "most frequent word" list was by and far the most valuable thing in the book (and something that is in every respectable GRE guidebook -- Princeton, Kaplan, etc.). As I mentioned in my last post, I saw at least 7-10 words on test that were on the list, a larger portion than I would've expected. Memorize that list. At the end of it all, I took all the paper practice tests and the CAT test on the CD-Rom, and got scores consistently in the 600-650ish range. The CAT test I scored a 550.
MyGRETutor.com -- I stumbled on this website after I had exhausted all the practice tests that the Baron's guide had to offer. This site has hundreds of test questions (the first ten on each section are free) and one free CAT. There are also four other tests that can be unlocked, as well as the other test questions, for $5. The cheap price of the tests should've been a warning sign, but I didn't do my research and promptly paid to access the rest of the tests. In short, this site is horrible. The practice questions are inexact, vague, and confusing. While I'd never hold the GREs up on a pedestal as paragons of testing standards -- you can always count on their questions as at least definite. It's a very bad sign when you read through the answers of a test and find yourself saying "really?" over and over again. Even worse, there were at least a few grammatical errors on the reading comprehension sections of their tests. So yeah. Not very reputable. To give you an idea of how accurate their internal CAT scoring was, I scored on the five tests as high as 710 and as low as 540.
800score.com -- Frustrated by MyGRETutor.com, I continued to search online for a resource of reputable (and accurate) CATs to practice, and found this site. They're a pure test site, and offer five CATs to download for $20. I did a little bit of research, sampled a little bit of their free test, and went ahead and paid for their product. Much much better. The questions were better worded, more precise, and, most importantly, had answers that did not leave me scratching my head. My test score range was 540 to 600, a much tighter band of numbers, which is indicative of a more accurate test.
The ETS website -- ETS provides two free CATs for download from their website, both of which I scored 630 on. They can be found here. There's not too much to say, except that these tests come straight from the horse's mouth, and (unsurprisingly) yielded the scores that were most similar to my eventual score. A definite download, since they are free (though not really, since you pay through the nose to just take the test, never mind the $20 fee you pay per school to send the test!) and since they will be most representative of the GRE test you'll be taking.
Notice the wide range of scores that I got on each of the CATs above:
Barron's: 550-650
MyGRETutor.com: 540-710
800score.com: 540-600
ETS website: 630
The lesson? The GRE's computer adaptive tests are notoriously difficult to emulate without the exact scoring system utilized by the ETS and without the amount of data that the ETS has at their fingertips. My actual score was 650, which was a bit higher than I expected, but one that makes sense in retrospect. It was the score that was closest to the practice tests provided by the ETS. You'd almost expect the other resources to want to underscore people -- which I believe they do -- because it simply makes sense as a business practice; lower expectations are much easier to deal with than higher ones. So what do we take from this? Find and take as many tests as you can afford. But do your research, and stay away from the poor websites. Interpret your scores with a large grain of salt. And most importantly, have faith in your abilities!
Welcome to my random thoughts on the GREs, part two. Part one can be found here. It occurred to me yesterday that I needed to give a little more background to where I'm coming from educationally to give a little bit more perspective on my scores. I graduated from college four years ago from Purdue with a degree in Genetics with a horrible 2.46 GPA. Suffice to say that I have never been a very hard worker. But I've always been a pretty good standardized tester. In the month leading up to my test on September 13, I first took a baseline practice test just to see how badly my verbal skills had declined in college and got a 500-550 score. Following that, I studied semi-regularly on the weekends, taking practice tests, memorizing words. When I was about a week out before the real thing, I went into "hardcore" mode and studied nonstop using the strategies I outlined in my GRE thoughts, part one. Additionally, I did some very light studying on the math and essay sections.
On to the various websites and resources, as promised in my previous post.
Barron's GRE Guide -- This was the first thing I bought in preparation for the test, and was my base resource. It's basically everything you'd expect from a GRE guidebook -- complete with five paper practice tests, one CAT test (on a CD), general study strategies, a "most frequent word" list (weighing in at 333 words), and a much more massive 3,500-word list. To be honest, I have no idea why the 3,500-word list was in there. Unless you buy this book a year to six months outside of the test, there's no way anyone would be able to reliably memorize all those words. And even then, it's not going to cover all the possible words you would potentially see on the test. Simply put, the best way to get that tasty 700+ GRE score is to be generally well read -- something that comes from decades of reading regularly. For the more realistic studier, the "most frequent word" list was by and far the most valuable thing in the book (and something that is in every respectable GRE guidebook -- Princeton, Kaplan, etc.). As I mentioned in my last post, I saw at least 7-10 words on test that were on the list, a larger portion than I would've expected. Memorize that list. At the end of it all, I took all the paper practice tests and the CAT test on the CD-Rom, and got scores consistently in the 600-650ish range. The CAT test I scored a 550.
MyGRETutor.com -- I stumbled on this website after I had exhausted all the practice tests that the Baron's guide had to offer. This site has hundreds of test questions (the first ten on each section are free) and one free CAT. There are also four other tests that can be unlocked, as well as the other test questions, for $5. The cheap price of the tests should've been a warning sign, but I didn't do my research and promptly paid to access the rest of the tests. In short, this site is horrible. The practice questions are inexact, vague, and confusing. While I'd never hold the GREs up on a pedestal as paragons of testing standards -- you can always count on their questions as at least definite. It's a very bad sign when you read through the answers of a test and find yourself saying "really?" over and over again. Even worse, there were at least a few grammatical errors on the reading comprehension sections of their tests. So yeah. Not very reputable. To give you an idea of how accurate their internal CAT scoring was, I scored on the five tests as high as 710 and as low as 540.
800score.com -- Frustrated by MyGRETutor.com, I continued to search online for a resource of reputable (and accurate) CATs to practice, and found this site. They're a pure test site, and offer five CATs to download for $20. I did a little bit of research, sampled a little bit of their free test, and went ahead and paid for their product. Much much better. The questions were better worded, more precise, and, most importantly, had answers that did not leave me scratching my head. My test score range was 540 to 600, a much tighter band of numbers, which is indicative of a more accurate test.
The ETS website -- ETS provides two free CATs for download from their website, both of which I scored 630 on. They can be found here. There's not too much to say, except that these tests come straight from the horse's mouth, and (unsurprisingly) yielded the scores that were most similar to my eventual score. A definite download, since they are free (though not really, since you pay through the nose to just take the test, never mind the $20 fee you pay per school to send the test!) and since they will be most representative of the GRE test you'll be taking.
Notice the wide range of scores that I got on each of the CATs above:
Barron's: 550-650
MyGRETutor.com: 540-710
800score.com: 540-600
ETS website: 630
The lesson? The GRE's computer adaptive tests are notoriously difficult to emulate without the exact scoring system utilized by the ETS and without the amount of data that the ETS has at their fingertips. My actual score was 650, which was a bit higher than I expected, but one that makes sense in retrospect. It was the score that was closest to the practice tests provided by the ETS. You'd almost expect the other resources to want to underscore people -- which I believe they do -- because it simply makes sense as a business practice; lower expectations are much easier to deal with than higher ones. So what do we take from this? Find and take as many tests as you can afford. But do your research, and stay away from the poor websites. Interpret your scores with a large grain of salt. And most importantly, have faith in your abilities!
Friday, October 16, 2009
Recycled: GRE Thoughts
I've been away for a long, long time, but I've had a good excuse. I've been toiling away, hard at work in grad school. This should be no news at all to anyone who is seriously preparing for grad school, but it is busy. Really busy.
But that's another post. In an effort to keep this blog semi-active over the next few months, until I at least get my legs underneath me to start generating new content, I'll be recycling many of my old posts about the MFA application process. This information is a year old, but I think still very relevant for the upcoming 2009 application season. This first post was put up on October 7, 2008, and is on GREs, how they relate to MFA programs, some general thoughts, and preparation. Enjoy!
Ah, the GREs. The GREs manage walk the frustrating line of being barely important enough to an application to warrant studying for. Many top schools don’t "require" the GREs, but as some websites gently suggest (like Iowa in this link -- scroll down to point 4 under "Other Notes on Admission and Residency Requirements"), scores can often affect funding. And whenever funding dollars are involved, you can be sure that it is important enough to put time and study into. Some insights and strategies I learned when preparing for the GREs:
I took the test on September 13th, and got a 650 on the Verbal, a 680 on the Math, and a 6.0 on the essay section. Verbal, of course, is the big kahuna of the GREs, and really the only score that the schools will care about. My basic strategy for the Verbal portion consisted of two basic rules:
1) Memorize the "most frequent word" lists provided by any of the Barron's/Kaplan/Princeton study books. This was important to my success. Already have a gigantic vocabulary? Great. You'll do wonderfully on the test, and will have nothing to worry about. But for the rest of us, it’s impractical and unrealistic to even attempt to memorize the 3,500 word lists provided by the preparation books. The "most frequent word" list represents a much more realistic and efficient way of targeting words that you'd be likely to see on a test. My prep book's list was a little over 300 words, which I managed to cram in about two weeks before the test. During the test I recognized at least 7-10 words from that list, which was a significant portion of the test.
2) Take as many practice tests as you can. Myself, I took at least 20 practice tests from a variety of sources. I can’t stress how important it was to me to take those practice tests. As much as the ETS would like you to believe, the GREs are not a measure of practical knowledge, but really a measure of well you can take the GREs. The problems on the Verbal section of the GREs, especially the analogy questions, require a large amount of familiarity to have any kind of success. So in addition to the relearning those baseline strategies you’d use for the SATs or ACTs back in high school (eliminating obvious answers, etc.), I was able to improve my pattern recognition of certain kinds of questions through a ton of repetition. Cramming works.
Another tricky aspect of the GREs is the fact that they are Computer Adaptive Tests (CATs) conducted on computers, as opposed to paper tests. What is a CAT? In essence, it’s a test that “adapts” its question difficulty based on how many questions you answer correctly or incorrectly. The more consecutive questions you get correct on a test, the more difficult a test becomes, and vice versa, all to eventually determine your final score. But there's more than that. Since the test uses the thirty questions to zero in on your score, it tends to weight the first 15 questions more heavily than the last 15. For example, before you answer even one question, your initial score, like everyone else's, will be set on the average of the bell curve of all those who've previously taken the test (somewhere around 400-500). If you answer the first question right, the computer will nudge you up into the tier of questions intended for 500-600 scoring folks, and if you were to get it wrong, the computer will shift you down into the tier for the 300-400 folks. As the test progresses, those large point swings will get smaller and smaller as the computer "figures out" the appropriate level of difficulty of questions for you. By the end of the test, a correct question will only be work 10-20 points each. Keep in mind that while my math above is hypothetical (I don’t really know if the point swings are 100 at the beginning or not), the process is the same.
As you can see, the first 10 or so questions are incredibly important to moving into the highest possible tiers, as you can only move your score so much once you get into the later stages of the test. One of the most common criticisms of the GREs is that the test unfairly punishes those who make mistakes early on without much hope for improvement later. But if you go into the GREs knowing this, you can similarly use this to your advantage. With 30 minutes to answer 30 questions, I knew I wasn't going to get every single question right, but I took the extra time on the first 10 questions to carefully answer them and to make sure that I got as many right as I possibly could. In fact, I probably employed this strategy a little too effectively -- at one point I had about 14 minutes to answer the remaining 20 questions -- and had to really rush in order to answer every single question. I had no doubt I probably answered more questions incorrectly on the second half of the test, yet I still got (in my own estimation) a pretty good score. So while it may feel counterintuitive as a test-taking strategy to front weight your time on the test, it really is something worth thinking about.
In my next post I'll go a little bit deeper into the resources and tests I used for preparation for the GREs.
But that's another post. In an effort to keep this blog semi-active over the next few months, until I at least get my legs underneath me to start generating new content, I'll be recycling many of my old posts about the MFA application process. This information is a year old, but I think still very relevant for the upcoming 2009 application season. This first post was put up on October 7, 2008, and is on GREs, how they relate to MFA programs, some general thoughts, and preparation. Enjoy!
Ah, the GREs. The GREs manage walk the frustrating line of being barely important enough to an application to warrant studying for. Many top schools don’t "require" the GREs, but as some websites gently suggest (like Iowa in this link -- scroll down to point 4 under "Other Notes on Admission and Residency Requirements"), scores can often affect funding. And whenever funding dollars are involved, you can be sure that it is important enough to put time and study into. Some insights and strategies I learned when preparing for the GREs:
I took the test on September 13th, and got a 650 on the Verbal, a 680 on the Math, and a 6.0 on the essay section. Verbal, of course, is the big kahuna of the GREs, and really the only score that the schools will care about. My basic strategy for the Verbal portion consisted of two basic rules:
1) Memorize the "most frequent word" lists provided by any of the Barron's/Kaplan/Princeton study books. This was important to my success. Already have a gigantic vocabulary? Great. You'll do wonderfully on the test, and will have nothing to worry about. But for the rest of us, it’s impractical and unrealistic to even attempt to memorize the 3,500 word lists provided by the preparation books. The "most frequent word" list represents a much more realistic and efficient way of targeting words that you'd be likely to see on a test. My prep book's list was a little over 300 words, which I managed to cram in about two weeks before the test. During the test I recognized at least 7-10 words from that list, which was a significant portion of the test.
2) Take as many practice tests as you can. Myself, I took at least 20 practice tests from a variety of sources. I can’t stress how important it was to me to take those practice tests. As much as the ETS would like you to believe, the GREs are not a measure of practical knowledge, but really a measure of well you can take the GREs. The problems on the Verbal section of the GREs, especially the analogy questions, require a large amount of familiarity to have any kind of success. So in addition to the relearning those baseline strategies you’d use for the SATs or ACTs back in high school (eliminating obvious answers, etc.), I was able to improve my pattern recognition of certain kinds of questions through a ton of repetition. Cramming works.
Another tricky aspect of the GREs is the fact that they are Computer Adaptive Tests (CATs) conducted on computers, as opposed to paper tests. What is a CAT? In essence, it’s a test that “adapts” its question difficulty based on how many questions you answer correctly or incorrectly. The more consecutive questions you get correct on a test, the more difficult a test becomes, and vice versa, all to eventually determine your final score. But there's more than that. Since the test uses the thirty questions to zero in on your score, it tends to weight the first 15 questions more heavily than the last 15. For example, before you answer even one question, your initial score, like everyone else's, will be set on the average of the bell curve of all those who've previously taken the test (somewhere around 400-500). If you answer the first question right, the computer will nudge you up into the tier of questions intended for 500-600 scoring folks, and if you were to get it wrong, the computer will shift you down into the tier for the 300-400 folks. As the test progresses, those large point swings will get smaller and smaller as the computer "figures out" the appropriate level of difficulty of questions for you. By the end of the test, a correct question will only be work 10-20 points each. Keep in mind that while my math above is hypothetical (I don’t really know if the point swings are 100 at the beginning or not), the process is the same.
As you can see, the first 10 or so questions are incredibly important to moving into the highest possible tiers, as you can only move your score so much once you get into the later stages of the test. One of the most common criticisms of the GREs is that the test unfairly punishes those who make mistakes early on without much hope for improvement later. But if you go into the GREs knowing this, you can similarly use this to your advantage. With 30 minutes to answer 30 questions, I knew I wasn't going to get every single question right, but I took the extra time on the first 10 questions to carefully answer them and to make sure that I got as many right as I possibly could. In fact, I probably employed this strategy a little too effectively -- at one point I had about 14 minutes to answer the remaining 20 questions -- and had to really rush in order to answer every single question. I had no doubt I probably answered more questions incorrectly on the second half of the test, yet I still got (in my own estimation) a pretty good score. So while it may feel counterintuitive as a test-taking strategy to front weight your time on the test, it really is something worth thinking about.
In my next post I'll go a little bit deeper into the resources and tests I used for preparation for the GREs.
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