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Thanks! It's true this is equivalent to undergraduate RA role. In my undergraduate time I did run participants for a while in a social psychology lab. Hopefully this current role could help to get myself more familiarized with the setting. Though from what I see people do pay attention to how the models developed by the quant people were applied and where the inadequacy is in practice, so substantive works I suppose could better facilitate new ideas. Literature reviews in quant areas only tell me what has been done, but it is hard to see where the need still rests (unless maybe an advanced person could reason from the literature review or simulation what theoretically could be improved.) I also had not realized that quant psyc was important before getting involved in that social psychology lab mentioned above. Regarding the application pool, that indeed looks like a telltale head count.. the 3 or 4 quant psyc graduate students I checked online consistently have pretty strong profiles though (graduate with honor, research projects, etc.) So I guess at least the status quo might not concern us much for being crowded but possibly remains quite competitive as other areas.

@Quant_Psych_2018 Sure I was certainly much glad to see such a relevant thread as well (I couldn't believe this thread was opened in February). Many thanks for your advice on spinning the experience. It does look like a good understanding of the application of quantitative methods from past projects would help. I will see what I could do here, and if @spunky wouldn't mind, please feel free to comment on my status in any way convenient. The opinions you shared before have been insightful. Regarding my current "lab shadowing", it is really my way of calling a research assistant position. I do RA work almost full-time under a quantitative psychology lab, which essentially comprises of looking into literature, shaping ideas and attempting to realize them with codes. I call it shadowing because my involvement so far is largely observational as I couldn't contribute a whole lot yet and have been mostly listening to other people. My professor is kind enough to allow me some learning time before I could pick up actual implementation work. It is true I have not see much avidity around me into the quant psyc area. On the other hand, many APA materials regarding the growth potential of this area were almost ten years old. I am not sure how many incoming students these programs actually plan to have now (e.g. it seems to me Notre Dame's website only updated two new grad students in the quant psyc area, but I might be mistaken), but let's keep up with the preparation.

It helps to see what kinds of questions on Magoosh math you struggled with. If it is a particular concept then you could certainly do more review on it. Some of the very hard ones were quite unnecessary in my opinion. Yet with Magoosh, working excessively on the same level of questions do not help significantly as the formats they have becomes too familiar to you soon. I think you could certainly use some of the original ETS program sets such as powerprep online to prepare a few days before the test. Some of the schools list their program requirement and talk about how they evaluate candidates so you might try to look for it. I remember seeing a program in my area (quantitative psychology) placing GRE as having the secondary importance, less than research experience and PS, but certainly not ignorable. A higher score is certainly better in any case...

Kaplan is said by some to be not emulating the original GRE questions so well as some other materials. This could include the similarity in passage/math difficulty, the vocabulary and the structuring and juxtaposition of the choices. My experience is to work on more simulating materials such as official verbal/quant guides and Magoosh (Manhattan is said to be a good resource as well), and to analyze the individual questions well afterwards to summarize tips and thoughts in answering certain types of questions, things like why A is eliminated and why B is chosen.

This could depend on the current quantitative score. If you were aiming for around 165, it would help to identify and tackle the particular areas of weakness you have and do some customized practice. Overall, fully digesting qualified materials such as the official quantitative reasoning guide or the majority of Magoosh would certainly help, and a month should be fine.

Right Magoosh''s math questions were harder. In my experience some of the hard and very hard ones help to learn about new ways of applying key concepts, especially some of the combination and permutation ones. Some others are rather unnecessary by invoking peculiar concepts. Feel free to tailor the questions to your advantage.

Hey thanks for starting this thread. I am currently shadowing in a quantitative psychology lab and planning to apply for the 18 Fall quantitative psychology program. My main concern now is a lack of coherent quantitative psychology research experience. I finished my bachelor degree this May with a psychology and business double major. My undergrad research experience, besides scattered research papers in politics and a thesis in finance (with a longitudinal data set I built with R), involved doing social psychology RA briefly and shadowing at my current quant psyc lab. While I can see myself weaving these diverse or rather piecemeal experience into my PS, I am now still making up knowledge in the quant psyc area, stumbling among papers and textbooks related to the topics that I am supposed to discuss with my interested potential advisers and with people at my current lab. Besides, my undergrad transcript does not have many quantitative courses aside from introductory stats, research methods classes from psychology department and an IRT class, in which my grades were fine. It would be great if anyone could comment on the overall expectation I should hold regarding my application positioning, and possibly also how specific my research topic has to be in the personal statement. I do believe in the strength of better methodology and is currently taking online MOOCs such as mathematical statistics, Bayesian and linear algebra to make up quantitative courses as well. I imagine for my application I have to be able to at least comment on the related (Bayesian methods, multilevel modeling with SEM ) quant psyc topics? First post on gradcafe and many thanks!