People that have taken the PGRE..

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cstjohn
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Joined: Wed Jul 23, 2014 7:49 pm

People that have taken the PGRE..

Post by cstjohn » Wed Jul 23, 2014 8:03 pm

How similar are the practice exams to the real thing? Is there any overlap with questions from the previous exams?


Also, are there any other sources for practice questions other than the previous GREs (8677, 9277, 9677, 0177). I'm afraid that after working through all the exams, I will just remember the question and its answer rather than the underlying physics.

tweetie_brid
Posts: 63
Joined: Wed May 30, 2012 7:59 pm

Re: People that have taken the PGRE..

Post by tweetie_brid » Wed Jul 23, 2014 10:42 pm

i think the difficulty was like the 2008 exam. the same one they mail you. but the other exams give you much needed practice.

TakeruK
Posts: 941
Joined: Mon Jan 02, 2012 3:05 pm

Re: People that have taken the PGRE..

Post by TakeruK » Thu Jul 24, 2014 4:52 am

cstjohn wrote:How similar are the practice exams to the real thing? Is there any overlap with questions from the previous exams?


Also, are there any other sources for practice questions other than the previous GREs (8677, 9277, 9677, 0177). I'm afraid that after working through all the exams, I will just remember the question and its answer rather than the underlying physics.
There's the 0877 exam too which is the one they now mail you. So that's 5 exams = 500 questions. If you can really memorize 500 question and answers, then I think this will actually serve you well on the real PGRE. I found that when I took the PGRE (2009 and 2011), the questions were pretty similar to the old exams, especially 0877. I think a big part of doing well on the PGRE is not just knowing the Physics but knowing the tricks/strategies behind answering each question.

There are no other official practice questions other than these 5 exams. But you can find many books written by other people (i.e. not ETS, the exam writers) with questions to practice on. Some of them are good (right level of difficulty and detail as the real questions) while others are not very good at simulating test questions (but still may be useful for preparing yourself for the Physics). I think a successful PGRE study strategy would focus both on test taking strategies / getting used to the type of questions as well as learning Physics. I'd even say that you would want to almost put equal weight on these two parts!

catharsis
Posts: 15
Joined: Tue Jan 28, 2014 9:45 am

Re: People that have taken the PGRE..

Post by catharsis » Wed Aug 06, 2014 4:32 pm

I found that the practice exams were more similar to the actual exam than I expected

djh101
Posts: 97
Joined: Tue Jul 15, 2014 4:08 pm

Re: People that have taken the PGRE..

Post by djh101 » Fri Sep 19, 2014 6:36 pm

How do the current tests compare to the 2001 tests? Both of those were pretty awful- lots of number crunching compared to the older two that could be done mostly with limits if you knew the concepts well. The '85 test I finished right on time (no time to check answers, though) but the second '01 test I only got through around 85 and the first test (taking right now) is looking like it's going to be similar.

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drunkphysics
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Re: People that have taken the PGRE..

Post by drunkphysics » Mon Sep 29, 2014 12:19 pm

The real exam is pretty similar to the 0877 exam, which you can download from ETS website. I would highly recommend the Conquering the Physics GRE book. I've been studying from it all summer, and after taking the September exam last weekend, I was really surprised at how many questions/subjects I saw that were tackled by the book. It's a pretty good resource for highlighting key concepts you need to know, without getting caught up in extraneous details that will never show up in the exam.



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