Students prefer to study alone for GRE

Despite efforts from the University to normalize seeking help, many Penn students don’t like to ask for it — even when they’re testing to apply to graduate school.

“One of [my students] took the GRE before, and he failed,” said fifth-year math graduate student Anna Pun, who is a private tutor for the Graduate Record Examinations. After his low math score, the senior turned to Pun for tutoring in preparation to retake the test. Another of her students, also a senior, had also failed the math section of the GRE — twice.

Pun said that she does not get many GRE students, and the majority of her students want tutoring for classes. Students may be more likely to find online or print practice materials and study on their own, turning to tutors as a last resort or only temporarily.

“I met with a tutor one time for the GRE, because I didn’t know how it worked,” College senior Anna Zandi said. Zandi, who will be starting her graduate studies this fall, took the GRE last November. She began studying in September.

"[The tutor] broke down how exactly the test is composed and what’s important and what’s not ... This is what you should do, this is what the exam’s like, these are the good resources you should go for,” Zandi said.

Zandi did not continue studying with the tutor. Instead, she studied by solving practice problems and tests released by Educational Testing Service, the company that creates the GRE.

Through Penn Student Agencies, students can get a $200 discount from Kaplan Test Prep for courses in preparation for standardized tests including the GRE, the Law School Admission Test and the Medical College Admission Test. But given that Kaplan’s GRE preparation course costs $1,299, the discount may not provide students with much relief.

The test has come under fire from critics who claim that it does not accurately predict success in graduate school and that, like many standardized tests, the GRE has a racial bias. The University of Arizona College of Law turned heads in February after it announced that it would be accepting the GRE in place of the LSAT; as Jeff Thomas, executive director of pre-law programs at Kaplan Test Prep, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the GRE is regarded as the “easier” test.

Unlike the LSAT or the MCAT, there is significant variance in the ways that graduate schools and even individual programs evaluate GRE scores.

Zandi knew she primarily needed to focus on the quantitative section of the GRE, because it’s more relevant to her field of financial economics. Overall, though, she doesn’t think the GRE was a significant part of her application.

“The way I think of it is, you need to meet a certain threshold, and beyond that it doesn’t matter that much,” she said. “I think on the sites of some of the programs that I [applied to], it specifically said [they] take into account other factors than the GREs.”

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