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Tips and Tricks for the Subject Exam


CSJ

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Hey All,

I have recently learned that some of the schools for the programs I am applying to (phd in I/O) require the subject exam for their consideration. I was just wondering if anyone who has taken in the past has any tips or tricks to receive a higher score. Any advice would be very helpful. Thanks.

Cory

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Hey All,

I have recently learned that some of the schools for the programs I am applying to (phd in I/O) require the subject exam for their consideration. I was just wondering if anyone who has taken in the past has any tips or tricks to receive a higher score. Any advice would be very helpful. Thanks.

Cory

I know what hurt me when I took the subject test was the fact that I didn't make myself more rounded prior to taking the test. I focus mostly with Experimental, Abnormal and Personality psychology when I was an undergrad and didn't take any classes involved with Perception or Educational Psych. You can look online I believe and get the breakdown of the different subjects that will be covered by the test, but when I took it, I remember it being very Perception and Experimental with a touch of the other areas.

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No real tricks for the exam, other than eliminating answer choices and just guessing. I find that with a lot of the questions, you either have to explicitly know the answer to be able to discern between 2-4 very similar answer choices (which statistical test would you use, which experimenter did what, etc), or have a general gist of what the answer is and eliminate obvious wrong answers.

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No real tricks for the exam, other than eliminating answer choices and just guessing. I find that with a lot of the questions, you either have to explicitly know the answer to be able to discern between 2-4 very similar answer choices (which statistical test would you use, which experimenter did what, etc), or have a general gist of what the answer is and eliminate obvious wrong answers.

I agree with university99 about the level of specificity of the questions, some of the questions are extremely broad while others are a hit and a miss if you don't know what a specific psychologist is famous for. What several professors suggested that I should be doing while I was studying for the subject GRE was to basically read the general psychology book from your undergrad general psych class. Another thing that I did to further expose myself is by getting a barron's book and just keep practicing.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Its similar to the SATs because of the same following rules:

1-correct answer yields a certain point

2-incorrect answer would lose you 1/4 of what the question worth is going to be

3- skipped won't have points deducted

Once all the points are added up to a RAW score, it will then be converted to the final weighted score which is based off of how your peers did on the same test.

To answer your question, you could hypothetically just answer 130 questions out of 215 and skip the rest. But if you get all 130 of them right, then that will look more impressive than attempting to answer all the questions and only getting 140 correct but have 75 incorrect (due to the point deduction). The two scenarios that I mentioned would add up to different raw scores which leads to different weighted scores.

This is what I've read and heard. The best concrete advice is to practice.

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