Feb 18, 2008

Good Advices

I did my GRE biochem, and I'll tell you what, the best advise I can give is - keep a clear head be aware AND DON'T FREAK OUT (also, get lots of sleep before the exam).

I didn’t rely a bit on the stuff I learnt a week before the exam. I leaned on prior exam and class experience; also, I found it to be real easy to derive answers to many questions that you would not normally know (using elimination). But most importantly, don't care about problems you can't solve - if a question takes more than 40 seconds to answer, go to the next one. Do all the hard ones at the end.

A little solace I received from my professors about the Biochem exam was that it is considered to be the hardest subject test on the ETS market because of its voluminous content. So, if you do well on the exam, its a BIG one up on others, but if you bomb it, admissions committees normally say "um, its a freaking hard exam, It doesn’t matter".
So, when you go to the exam hall, think of it as a fun challenge rather than an exam one has to face.

Good luck to everyone,
RanjAn

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I studied from the online texts at NCBI (also a little from SCHAUMs outlines... though the schaum book confused me because of its format). I can't say for sure what is important or not... but as you read through 'methods' make experimental senarios up in your head ...that helps a lot in the last 15 questions that mostly stumped me (cause they are not that hard... just lengthy to read).

RanjAn

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"A little solace I received from my professors about the Biochem exam was that it is considered to be the hardest subject test on the ETS market because of its voluminous content. So, if you do well on the exam, its a BIG one up on others, but if you bomb it, admissions committees normally say "um, its a freaking hard exam, It doesn’t matter"

I would be very surprised if an admissions committee said it doesn't matter. This exam has shown for the couple of schools I have been involved with to be a very good determining factor of success, and more and more higher American Universities are requiring this test for admission when compared to 5 years ago. The exam is hard, intense, but so is graduate school.

Do not underestimate the importance of this exam, or how graduate committees view it. With the huge number of excellent applicants to better schools every year, you need something to distinguish yourself. This could be it.



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