Definitive Guide to the GRE Lit test

[WildeThing]

So, I've been reading a lot of threads about the exam here and there are a lot of complaints about the validity of the exam, which unfortunately is beyond our control. Also saw a lot of complaints about how the guides to the exam are outdated. I was hopng that perhaps those with experience in it can lay out what they think is a good way to approsch the exam in its current format.

Personally I have the Princeton book and the Norton anthologies of English and American litm but from reading comments I understand that relying on these is not good practice.

[Dr. Old Bill]

It's so hard to give a brief overview of strategies and tactics. The Princeton book has some merit, but not much -- the big takeaway there is to eliminate one guaranteed wrong answer, then make an educated guess when stuck between four possibilities. I would quibble and say that is more effective when stuck between two or three, but either way, the advice that "guessing helps" is sound. And the book has a few other tips and tricks, as well as overviews of major works of literature...all of which are somewhat helpful.

The big problem is that the format of the test has largely changed. Most of the passages are now quite long -- sometimes four or five paragraphs, with five or six questions related to each. As English majors, we are trained to read critically, which usually means close-reading and interpreting / analyzing as we go. Sure, we skim when we have to, but just for the gist of an article or work. The major disconnect between how English studies actually work and how the test works is rather astounding. The expectation is to be able to skim through the large passages and glean the answers to all of the questions...because you literally don't have time to actually read every passage. 230 questions in two hours and forty minutes means you have roughly 42 seconds per question. Take away the seconds it takes to make sure you've selected the right bubble on the sheet and have completely filled it in, let's call it 35 seconds per question. When these questions have to be answered based on long passages, it's easy to see that it may not be an impossibility to adequately read everything and answer most of the questions, but it's surely an implausibility.

One strategy that the Princeton book suggests is to just read the first sentence or two of a passage, and if you don't recognize it, move on. That might be sound, but they also say that if you've wound up reading three or four sentences, just read it all...but that's no longer sound advice. For a long passage, don't waste two minutes unless you really think you can get the answers right sans familiarity. Reading the questions first is usually a good strategy, but it can also be suggestive, putting names of authors or works in mind that suddenly occlude the real name of the author or work.

I suppose I haven't provided much in the way of tips, but beside the usual "broaden your knowledge" advice, I suppose learning to better skim or speed read is perhaps your best bet. Again, it goes contrary to any legitimate literary analysis, but it helps to think of this test as something completely different. It's not even trivia or cocktail party knowledge anymore. It's just a blend of arbitrary and tangential canonical knowledge, with a few nuggets of theory and non-canon thrown in for good measure.

 

 

[poliscar]

Honestly I don't think the Princeton book is bad, but as Wyatt's says it's not really fantastic when it comes to test strategy. Where I found it helpful was as a guide to test content. While the format of the exam has significantly changed, the material you're being tested on hasn't really. So the Princeton guide does give a fairly decent road map of the texts that are likely to appear. Likewise, it is a good entry point when it comes to studying; naturally you should be supplementing with the Norton Anthologies, but diving directly into them without some sort of filter or plan is not a good use of time. There are texts and authors that you likely can't or won't read before the test (the Restoration comedies, the Victorian critics, Sidney, etc...) but that the Princeton guide summarizes fairly nicely through character names, plot points, and central arguments. 

One area where the Princeton book is terrible, and I mean abysmally, shamefully bad, is in the context of theory. They have this bizarre subdivision of theoretical/critical approaches into "Psychological," "Linguistic," and "Marxist," which can be deeply misleading if you're not familiar with theory. I honestly don't really know what else to say about the section; it's just so laughably bad and dated. You're better off reading something like Jonathan Culler's Very Short Introduction, hell, even reading the first chapter of Jameson's Political Unconscious would give you a more wholistic and accurate overview of "theory." 

Finally, the recent emphasis on longer passages can be frustrating, and arguably does call for strategies of speed-reading & skimming. That being said, I'm not sure that the older format, with shorter passages, called for that different of a strategy. Regardless of passage length, it has never been a matter of close-reading. Moreover, when it comes to identification of keywords, characteristics of style, and poetic meter, the larger passages can prove advantageous. Objectively speaking, the longer the passage, the greater the likelihood of a significant clue appearing. It's sort of like those puzzles where you're asked to identify the whole of an image based on a comparatively small section of it. The larger the section given, the more contextual detail to work with. So without sounding too cryptic, I think it helps to think of the passages somewhat like images—you can oscillate between the part and the whole without necessarily combing every detail. Once you find something significant, i.e. "Newgate Prison" --> Dickens, you've potentially unlocked 3-4 out of 5 questions. A three sentence excerpt can make that more difficult than a three paragraph excerpt... 

[othersamantha]

I've taken the exam twice -- the first time I was completely underprepared and ended up canceling my scores (this was more than a year ago), and the second time was the October 29th test. It was honestly still awful and one of the more degrading experiences of my academic life. What follows is a disorganized summary of my thoughts/recollections from the exam (I've honestly blocked a lot of it out already, but have tried to include specific examples of the types of questions/passages I came across):

The first time around I used Vade Mecum and Hapax Legomena to create flash cards, but as I said, the test did not go well. The timing is a complete nightmare, as WT mentioned above. The second time around, I used the Princeton Review because I was desperate for some sort of guidance, and it definitely was comforting to have a list of things to read and people to know. I think though that the PR lulls you into a false sense of security and greatly exaggerates the likelihood that there will be an obvious clue in each passage. I think he leads you to believe that there will be a character or setting mentioned or some obvious stylistic quirk in any passage for which you will be asked to identify the author or work, and that was simply not true. Furthermore, I took the Princeton Review practice test a few weeks before the exam and was confident that I had the timing down (I finished all of the questions with just a few minutes to spare), when in the real exam, I was left with more than 100 unanswered questions with one hour to go.

I also think there was more Old and Middle English on the real exam that I took than in the PR book, and the questions were more involved than "Is this Old or Middle English?" There were a lot of questions like "which modern English word is the closest in meaning to ____" or "which line uses a grammar convention differently than modern English." These questions were not extremely difficult, but they could be time consuming depending on what you were being asked to do, how many lines of the passage you had to examine, etc. I wish that I had spent at least a little time more familiarizing myself with Middle English and thus would have been able to answer those questions even faster.

The one other thing I will add regarding the PR is that the degree of separation between the answer and the question is much greater than you would think from the PR book. What I mean by this is that in the PR book you will find practice questions along the lines of "the author of this passage is also the author of which other work" (A to B), but in the real exam, it seemed to me that the questions were more often along the lines of "the author of this passage is the contemporary of an author who wrote which of the following works" (X to Y to Z). It is definitely important to know contemporaries and be able to quickly match them up with one another in order to answer these questions that ask you to go one step beyond general work-to-author matching.

I do think the PR's strategy of first and second passes is worthwhile -- if it is a passage you recognize, the questions are (fairly) straightforward, and there will be a few standalone questions that will be very easy. The issue that I had is that in the real exam I probably only answered 20 questions on the first pass (compared to the PR practice test, where I'd estimate I recognized 40 to 50 percent of the passages straight off; again, false sense of security).

I truly think the key to mastering this exam is to take a lot of practice exams, but unfortunately, there just aren't that many available (and as I mentioned, the PR practice test is very much a test on what is in the PR book, rather than an accurate example of what is to be found in the real exam).

I will close by saying that although I'm not sure all of the many, many hours of work I put into preparing for this exam will pay off in terms of my score, it was actually quite fun to study for, and I feel much more knowledgeable about a lot of areas of literature that I had never formally studied before. I definitely think that if (cross fingers!) I am accepted into a program, it's knowledge that will be useful to me. 

I think it's important to keep in mind too that a lot of programs (even those who require it) don't set a lot in store by this exam (or so it seems). I don't think that I bombed it, but I certainly didn't ace it. I'm really hoping that my very strong verbal GRE score will be of more importance to admissions committees than this very expensive and very frustrating exam. If you think about it, it's probably the least important element of your application. So definitely take the time to prepare and do what you can do, but keep in mind that this is only one element of it, and also keep in mind that this is exam exists so that ETS can make money off of us. You can only do what you can do! And the feeling of being free of it, even if you're not confident about how you did, is just so, so sweet. Good luck!

Edited November 15, 2016 by othersamantha
Typo

[whodathunk]

Don't have a lot of time as I'm running up against a deadline but I'd like to offer some thoughts here, as I agree that there's definitely a paucity of online anecdotes about the current state of the test that are actually informative rather than just "what the fuck" screamed over and over. It's probably most helpful to show how it distinguishes not from the prep book (I didn't even open the PR book) but from the four practice tests that are available (I took all of them in the runup to my own testing experience).

Test content. While the distribution of subject matter is the same and it's not like there's really any new material, there are more passages, longer passages, more questions per passage. I was finishing practice tests with 20-35 minutes to spare, easily, and the first time I took the test I didn't even get to three of the passages. Just completely ran out of time. And I can only put a small part of that down to nerves/fatigue, really. I wasn't expecting how much of my mind-power would have to go not only toward answering the questions correctly, but also keeping up a very quick pace, in order to finish it. So my advice on that front would be to speed read and be aware of how your practice tests will differ from the real thing.

The identification questions are fewer in number and are also a bit of a joke, on that note--two passages I had asked the standard "Who wrote this" question, despite the fact that the back of the testing booklet had rights permissions (where the author and name was identified!) Such a huge giveaway. Whereas the first time I took the test, I found several of the ID questions impenetrable (e.g. translating a very old foreign language work with no context clues into modern english and asking you when the original was written...there's just absolutely no way of knowing unless you were very, very familiar with the OG text.)

Vade Mecum is still a help, though I'm dubious as to whether PR has much contemporary relevance--it's just so outdated from what people say. Quizlet helped a lot with learning poems; some people have uploaded mammoth GRE Lit sets. Definitely (re)learn the Bible and mythology if you aren't up to scratch on those; those questions are easy points. Listen to podcasts, watch documentaries on YouTube on various movements (i.e. is there something on Paradise Lost, another on Romantic poets, etc.). Basically in the month or so leading up to the test, utilise various modes of learning and absorption that don't only involve rote memorisation, which can only get you so far (and while making flashcards is great, it's also incredibly time-consuming, as you're probably writing a lot down on a single card to make it useful). Knowing the names of all of Donne's most famous poems will get you far less mileage than knowing how to distinguish what might be a poem of Donne's from a poem of Herbert's instinctively from their style and diction choices. There are far too many bad posts on this forum about preparation that involve actually trying to read several authors' oeuvres (I remember seeing a 200 book reading list which really freaked me out) and that could not be a more colossal waste of time for this specific purpose.

TLDR: The test as it currently stands an overpriced game of trivia on crack. Tailor your strategy accordingly, taking into account how you might cultivate skills of stylistic and content-based recognition, guesswork, and breadth of the canon. 

[erosanddust]

7 hours ago, whodathunk said:

Listen to podcasts, watch documentaries on YouTube on various movements (i.e. is there something on Paradise Lost, another on Romantic poets, etc.). Basically in the month or so leading up to the test, utilise various modes of learning and absorption that don't only involve rote memorisation, which can only get you so far (and while making flashcards is great, it's also incredibly time-consuming, as you're probably writing a lot down on a single card to make it useful).

I'm not able to add much, but I wanted to second this point. I did a lot of cue card making and Vade Mecum reviewing, but one of the most helpful things I did (that actually has continued to provide helpful background knowledge during my time at grad school, unlike most of my cramming) was to watch/listen to literature lectures from survey courses that have been made public in various ways. I got the "Great Courses" CDs for several literary periods from the public library and listened to them whenever I was in the car/on transit. I tried to watch one online lecture each night before bed. I'm sure iTunes U has some good stuff too. This was, frankly, more interesting than a lot of the factual study I was doing and I retained and directly used some of what I learned for my test.

Also, I heard from a recent test-taker that if you check the copyrights at the back of the test booklet, they'll sometimes give away an answer for a passage ID question.

[WildeThing]

Thanks guys. Is that true about permissions appearing on the back of the booklet? Isn't that a massive help?

[whodathunk]

39 minutes ago, WildeThing said:

Thanks guys. Is that true about permissions appearing on the back of the booklet? Isn't that a massive help?

I mean, it might get you the answers to two questions, but "massive" is overstating it. 

I pointed it out more because it signals how the test focuses less on ID questions now (they're not fussed if you're clever and look in the back of the booklet for a couple of the answers; I can't imagine they printed the tests without knowing) and more on reading comprehension--the ability to read complex literary texts quickly and answer 5-7 questions about them. 

[KTF87]

It is way beyond me why this GRE literature subject test is indicative, in any way and to any extent, of one's success in PhD programs. The absurdity of this exam is funny. Don't even get me started on the general GRE haha. I have very good scores in both, but I firmly believe these tests are completely irrelevant, and offensive.

I had to take the subject Test myself in October 2016, and I had been away from academia for more than 5 years. Even my MA courses had nothing to do with the canon work - the predominant, if not only material covered. Also, my research interests are not at all intersecting with the material covered by this test.

And I had a very demanding full-time job in advertising. This, coupled with the long time away from the "field", were detrimental in terms of time allocated to study and prepare. I scored pretty decently, but I still think I wouldn't want to work with any university that uses this exam as a valid caliber. Whether or not a score makes it or breaks, I feel sorry that it is even used by top universities that should focus on generative intellect, rigorous proactive research and original thinking (which represents the exact opposite of everything the GRE Subject Test).

 

Keep the faith guys! And remember that if a uni does not take you because of that exam, it means you're better off without that uni!!!