We have assembled US university application deadlines for spring 2013 semester. Here are 99 universities with application deadlines from June to December for the Spring 2013 semester.
Those numbers are important because they are part of the changes that make Analytical Writing (earlier called the Analytical Writing Measure) trickier and more demanding on the Revised General GRE,which was released in August last year.
So, what are the changes? Firstly as noted above, the essay section is now called just Analytical Writing (or AW for short). The ETS has been making changes in various aspects of the GRE test to make it more like the GMAT. This is one of them. The second is that the Issue Essay is now just for 30 minutes rather than 45 as earlier. This again, makes the GRE more like the GMAT.
Some good news from US policy holders: it’s now relatively easier to get US visas! Bad news: most of you obtaining US student visa for the very first time will not be benefited from the change. This policy change will most help those in the visa ‘renewals’ category. But unfortunately a large section of F1 Visa seekers are typically applying for the very first time.
We are still reviewing the visa policy, however from the first look, it seems that not much has changed for students.
Quantitative Reasoning in the Revised General GRE, like Verbal Reasoning has two sections with 20 questions each and for which 35 minutes solving time is given per section. Each Quantitative Reasoning section has mix of question types:
This makes a total of 7 different formats which are illustrated in the screenshots below. The screenshots are of the Dilip Oak’s Online test, but they will give you a good idea of what these formats will look like when you take the GRE computer-based test.
So, you are preparing for the GRE test. You know that the Verbal section is going to be demanding. What are the big challenges in the Verbal section of the Revised General GRE?
First, a bit of good bit of news: the Reading Comprehension passages on the Revised GRE test are short. A Verbal section generally contains 5 Reading Comprehension passages, most which are 20-25 lines long; and one of them may be as short as 3-5 lines. The longest passages are of about 40 lines or so. (See ETS’s introduction to reading comprehension, sample questions and tips)
When the Revised General GRE test was launched (way back on 1 August 2011), a whole host of changes was introduced. One consequence was a revamped Verbal Reasoning part in which there are now:
To sum up, Reading Comprehension is now more important, the Sentence Completion type questions got a little harder to get right and Vocabulary is more or less just as important as it was earlier – so, you still have to learn that GRE word list!). As a result of those two changes, students also find the Verbal section harder to complete on time. So, how do you handle that difficulty?