Graduate Entrance Exams

Should You Apply to Grad School?

Grad school is not for everyone. Just because your colleagues have an MBA, MA, or MS after their names don’t mean you should spend $100k and get yourself one, too.

Why?

The common misconception about grad school is that it helps you find your purpose in your career. That enables you to get a better shot at landing your dream job.

That’s not always the case. Some people have graduate and postgraduate degrees, but still, they think they don’t like what they are doing. They feel lost.

The key is to assess how determined you are about what you want to do with your career. For example, if you are positive that you want to excel at business administration and you want to develop theories or practices to help business organizations, then, by all means, take the GMAT and get an MBA.  If you are sure you want to run a non-profit for starving children one day, then take the GRE and get a Master's in Nonprofit Administration.

But, if your purpose is yet undetermined (and you haven't yet "sampled" the career in the real world), then don’t waste your time and money reviewing for the GRE or any other graduate entrance exam just yet.

Instead, try working for a few years, get experience in your chosen field, and only then can you determine if you need further studies.

Get into Your Top Graduate School

If you do decide to apply to grad school, you will want to make some preparations beforehand.

First of all, you need to get a strong GPA. Your undergraduate performance, especially in the subjects related to your chosen field, should reflect that you are indeed interested and capable in that field of study.

Besides, you'll need to achieve high test scores on your entrance exams. Whether you plan to enroll in a graduate school, business school, or any specialized school, remember that your test scores matter a lot.  They are the only genuinely standardized way that admissions officers can compare candidates against each other.

To prepare for a test, we strongly recommend that you use Brainscape’s adaptive web & mobile flashcards. These flashcards can help whether you are

• studying for the GMAT (for business school) 
• preparing for the GRE (for grad school) 
• increasing your GRE Psychology score (for a Psych Ph.D.)
• prepping for the LSAT (for law school)
• studying for the MCAT (for med school)
• reviewing for the PCAT (for pharmacy school)
• considering the BMAT, OAT, or TEAS (for some medical and nursing school)
• or exploring any other entrance and aptitude tests.

Brainscape’s flashcards were produced due to the collaboration between industry experts, tutors, teachers, and top students using questions from the previous test. Hence, you can rest assured that the information you get is in line with the test you are preparing to take.

How Important is the GRE?

A high GRE score may not get you accepted into your dream university, but a low GRE score gives you a high chance of being rejected.

You see, applying for graduate education requires you to come up with personal statements, letters of recommendation, and other documents that need individual attention.

With all the applications graduate schools are receiving, they may not have enough time to go through these documents one by one. So a big way to help them filter their applicants is to look at the GRE score. And if yours is below the school’s cutoff, then chances are your application will be rejected.

Thus, a high GRE score is crucial.

Brainscape has created approximately 2,000 flashcards with our certified GRE vocab product to help you get your target score. These vocabularies contain the most difficult terms commonly found in the exams.

Aside from containing relevant words, Brainscape’s uses a technique to help you remember these words quickly.

The key is the way Brainscape asks you to rate your level of mastery for a specific word. If it’s rated low, then this flashcard will automatically be shown to you repeatedly until you have mastered it, thereby ensuring that you learn the most in the shortest amount of time.

Why Spaced Repetition Works

Spaced repetition uses two techniques, as the name suggests: a) repeating the concept you want to learn and b) creating space before repeating the idea.

According to Hermann Ebbinghaus, humans tend to forget information significantly as time passes if the information is not reinforced.

However, repeating the memory only within the early days that the information is acquired won’t help you remember it in the long term because your memory hasn’t decayed much in those periods.

Hence, for spaced repetition to work, you should repeat it several times but make sure to put enough spacing between each reinforcement for you to remember better.

Decades of cognitive science research have proven spaced repetition to be the most critical determinant of whether you'll be able to remember new concepts, and Brainscape has taken it to the next level with Confidence-Based Repetition (CBR).  CBR combines the three mental faculties of Active Recall, Metacognition, and Spaced Repetition to optimize your study time truly.

So get started studying today, and best of luck on your exams!