TK2

I'd say this is a little stronger than your issue essay - 4? 4.5? - but lacking in concrete examples. You note the flaw in the reasoning - the basis of the argument in the straightforward comparison between the two counties, but then you simply say that that's a problem over and over without giving any examples beyond saying that there probably are examples, or addressing the counter of Chestnut county. The 15 year thing isn't convincing either - that's a good time frame to assess that kind of thing. The question is interested in the consequences of a decades-long process. You could have talked about Pine county being closer to a big city or good transit links to a big city, having had a new factory open, driving up demand for housing and prices, etc, when you talk about better economy. Or, even better (I think) brought up real world examples of divergence in real state prices. "Major metropolitan areas, such as New York and San Francisco, have seen housing costs double and triple over the past ten years, while homes elsewhere across the country have lost their value due to the financial crisis of 2008." etc. Apparently, no one will check whether this stuff, as you write it, is accurate, it just kinda has to make sense.

Mmmmm.... going to give this a try, and take it all with a grain of salt. I'd give you a weak 4, maybe even a 3.5. - You have some fairly jarring mistakes in grammar, and use of vocabulary. "Good intentions may be absent from the child." "Practiced in more abundance." - The logical support and examples are a little wonky. The burglary example makes little sense. Surely a teaching-related example is more appropriate, not to mention more common in most people's lives, not to mention its not great logic. Positive reinforcement in a school setting is very different social and ethical context from law enforcement. The lightbulb is also coming from a somewhat different situation. You don't have any example of the role of praise/disapproval in education at all, just quite scattered points about things that work and things that don't. - The overall chain of ideas otherwise is good - "learning from mistakes," as pro, conditioning as con - but you need to support the second paragraph with more substance (and the first with relevant substance) - The whole thing is a little on the short side. I'd say your first paragraph, simply restating the question, is a waste of your time. You seem to be struggling to write a lot within the time limit, so go straight to the meat of your argument. Good luck!

What is the underlying logic of this section? What does it want? The comprehension questions are employing some brand of reductive robot reasoning (or terribly sophisticated appraisal) that I just can't seem to hack. I get 165ish on verbal, no matter what I do, and it hasn't moved one point since the first half-assed practice test I did six months ago. I don't run into any words I don't know, so it's not the vocabulary. I comfortably have 10-15 minutes per section left when I'm done, and that's with allowing myself to read the long passages closely through. My quant score is probably not going to cross middling, so it would be nice to compensate with a perfect verbal, at least, and I seem to have all the tools at my disposal to get those 4-5 missing points, including dead time on the test itself - I just can't figure out what to do with them. How the hell does one tackle this?

I'm starting to think* that a lot of this is statistical noise. It's hard to get a complete picture from the semi-anecdotal data we have anyway (unless someone wants to go through the predicted/real scores thread and fill out an excel and try to disentangle the variables .) Substantial differences in scores are a function of a 2-4 question wrong/right difference. Exogenous effects like level of concentration and distraction, stress-induced (or just random) calculation errors, etc, make it look to me like it's very unlikely to find a real patterns between the different practice sets and the GRE itself. Some people may do better or worse on Magoosh/Manhattan/Princeton/The Real Thing, but it might be because the layout of one or the other is slightly more comfortable for them, or a particular set of questions is heavy a concept they're very good with, or they had a really good nights sleep or they do particularly badly under stress or, hell, particularly well under stress, and a lot less of the difference is down to a universally-applicable difference between the tests. *I'm also starting to procrastinate studying for the GRE by analyzing studying for the GRE. I would make such a fine academic, if I could get through this thing.

Thanks guys, I think that more or less clears that up - the number of correct answers in an overall harder section will count for more than a similar number of correct answers in an easy section, but each individual question counts for the same amount of points within the section, regardless of its difficulty level. I hate knowing that blowing the first section probably means I've automatically blown a lot of the second on as well. No wonder its not stressed too much in guide books.

Hi all, There's probably no single correct answer here, but what do you think of describing activist experience in applications, especially PhD? I have a fair bit - some of it is directly urbanism/planning related (like organizing an anti-demolition campaign of street stalls), more of it is related to other intersecting stuff that fits within my research interests (like working with refugees), some of it might be vaguely relevant as teaching experience, and some is just other stuff. (I like protesting, I guess. Some people do yoga. I've also been at it since I was 12, so it piles up.) I'm struggling to decide whether this is something to ignore, emphasize, mention in passing, describe as a motivation, assidiously hide all signs of? I reckon any application at PhD level has to be overwhelming about stressing research interests and ability, but my relevant professional experience will certainly be on there, and really my activism has sometimes shaded in and out of that anyway. Will it just sound oddball and self-congratulatory to list too much of this stuff, or will it give people a sense of what I'm about? Or do I not want to give them the sense that this is what I'm about? My research directions are not particularly social-justicey-focused, actually, but getting involved in that kind of stuff has been a valuable learning experience - in my opinion. But maybe admissions will disagree?

Since I'm down the GRE rabbit hole now, here's one thing I can't figure out. Information in various guides seems to be contradictory, even within the same guide. One the one hand - they clearly state that all questions count equally (and encourage skimming through and getting all easy questions first as a strategy.) But - they also state that a high number of correct answers in the first section will define the level of difficulty offered in the second section. And - finally, that the highest scores can only be earned by having access to, and correctly answering, the most difficult questions. So what's going on here? Do different questions factor differently? In the calculation of scores when normalized on the curve only? Or they all count the same in the first section and then are adjusted in the second section? What? I'm pretty sure its meaningless in terms of taking the test, i'm just obsessively curious at this point, possibly due to the level of loathing i'm developing for this thing. The opposite of hate being not love but indifference.