Ahh, the GREs… and we were all so relieved when the SATs were done. The SATs were just one piece of the long high school game; learn the rules, play as best you can, move on. Fortunately, I could see almost immediately that the GREs are pretty much the same creature with a different face. Two writing sections, a verbal reasoning section, and an analytical reasoning section;  I’ve seen that before. But four years after playing the SAT game, I took the opportunity to look at this type of test in a new light.

It turns out that at its core, the GRE is not about reading or writing or math; it’s about logic. The GRE states this in its preparatory material, though not in so many words. This is not a test that’s interested in how fast you can read or do algebra; those are just two ways of going about assessing a student’s ability to solve a problem. What I think scares most students about the GRE is that they perceive they are weak in one of its subject areas, and therefore worry that they will do poorly on that portion of the test. However, at its most fundamental level, the GRE is a test of the many different ways in which logic and reasoning can be implemented in academic and real-life settings. It’s a test of what we’ve already been doing for three years.

The use of logic and reasoning is most obvious in the two writing sections. In the first task, you must read a statement and take a position on it, then support that position with logical arguments. Similarly in the second task, you must read someone else’s argument and critique it. Both of these tasks are logic-based exercises; the type students have been doing every time they write a paper or hold a class discussion on an assigned reading. It’s not about the subject matter; it’s not even about writing skill to a certain extent. It’s about the creation of a logical argument.

Though the GRE website provided good example statements and responses and the grades they received, I found another way to prepare for the writing section of the test. I happened to be sitting pool-side on a Friday afternoon with a former roommate while I was preparing for this section. We struck up a conversation on the sample argument that had been presented, and spent about fifteen minutes dissecting its accuracy. I made a strong argument, but my friend responded with some counter-arguments that had not occurred to me. Having fifteen minute informal debates may not be quite as entertaining to others as it is to my friend and I, but it is a great way to practice putting together an augment quickly and supporting your position well without depending on background research.

Everyone seems to have a weak spot when it comes to standardized testing; for me it’s the verbal section. It wasn’t the reading, or understanding the reading, or even understanding the questions that got me in the end. Logic and reasoning serve well for those purposes. It was the vocabulary did me in. This is, in my opinion, the one hiccup in the otherwise well planned test. I’ve got a fairly large vocabulary, and it’s been years since I’ve run across a word in a reading that I didn’t understand, so it did not even occur to me to review vocabulary. But after one practice GRE and now having taken the real thing, my need to prepare in this area becomes clear.

I, as well as many students, have been trained to deduce the meanings of words through context, a logical response. But about a half of the questions in the verbal section of the GRE are analogies and antonyms, and have little to no context from which to decipher even a good guess, let alone a definition. Many of the words are also tricky; one word can have a meaning when it is an adverb and a completely different meaning when used as a noun. When context fails me, I turn to the etymology of the word, also a logical and reasoned response, which of course only works when you can recognize that some portion of the word is related to another word you know. This was, for me, the single most challenging aspect of the entire GRE. The easiest way to overcome this would have been to review ten advanced vocabulary words every week for three or four months. With a broader base of knowledge, my logical reasoning should have been able to take over quite successfully, as the creators of the test clearly intended.

And then there is the analytical reasoning section, more commonly known as the math section. I’ll honestly admit that this section of the test didn’t even scare me a little bit; I’m a science major who loves math. Doing algebra calms me down. But being pretty good at math wasn’t what comforted me on this part of the test; what made me sure I would be fine is that I could see immediately that this was just another facet of logic and reasoning. None of the “math” part of the test was more complicated than algebra and geometry; the only tricky bit was understanding what the questions were asking, and applying good reasoning. It’s the same way in which you don’t have to be good at math to do sudoku puzzles. Sudoku and the GRE aren’t testing math, they’re just testing a kind of logic that manifests itself quite often as mathematical skill: if a number is even it is divisible by two. If you divide a number by two and the result is even, the number was divisible by four. If a number is even and divisible by three it is also divisible by six. I think that it wasn’t the years of math and science classes that best prepared me for this portion of the test; it was years of doing puzzles and studying patterns.

So it turns out in the end that the GRE is testing things we’ve been doing all along; the test just presents the challenge in a less than obvious way. There are challenging aspects; interpreting questions and learning logical shortcuts to the correct answers. The obscure words that appear in the antonyms section certainly don’t help. But recognizing what the GRE was really testing made it possible for me to not only play the college game, play it well.