April test for August graduate enrollment?

[lanza]

Are your scores for the April test too late to be considered for graduate school applications? I graduate undergrad in May, but I haven't learned a thing about Thermo/Stat yet, so I'm not too confident about how my scores from this Saturday will be. That's sort of a -20 right from the start =/.

But by April I should have the GRE level concepts fully covered and I should do considerably better. But I'm worried this will be too late! Any opinions?

[quizivex]

Are your scores for the April test too late to be considered for graduate school applications?

LMAO... Considering your scores for the April test will come out after applications are due, after after decision letters are sent and after enrollment decisions are due on April 15, I'm voting YES unless you're interested in waiting until fall 2014 to enroll.

[TakeruK]

Just to clarify -- most people apply for graduate school BEFORE they finish their grad programs. That is, if you are planning to start grad school in August-September 2013, then the applications are mostly all due around December 2012 - January 2013.

In addition, most people write the PGRE without knowing all the concepts. Even the 990 scores don't need to answer every single question correctly. A good test strategy would be to only do the material you already know -- you can skip anything you did not cover yet. An alternative strategy is to look through old PGREs and identify what you actually have to know about thermo/stat in order to do some of the questions this Saturday. From my memory, I think there are mostly "2nd-3rd year" level questions like reading P-V diagrams, calculating work etc. (i.e. "thermodynamics") and only ~3 "stat mech" questions (which is normally a 4th year course), most of which involve writing the distribution function.