UMSL Behavioral Neuroscience GRE

[Psychgrad27]

Hey! I was wondering if anyone here has been accepted into UMSL's Behavioral Neuroscience program and what your GRE scores were? It seems the average is not posted on the website like it is for clinical and I/O. 

[St0chastic]

When applying I also found it frustrating that many programs didn't post admissions statistics. If you are scoring in the range of the posted clinical GRE scores (>160 verbal and >155 quant) I imagine that should be good enough assuming your other stats are solid...of course that is unsubstantiated speculation on my part. Unless your scores are much lower than that, in my opinion it's worth taking the gamble and applying. Nothing ventured nothing gained.

Edited November 26, 2016 by St0chastic

[Psychgrad27]

Thanks, yeah I am going to apply. I may take the GRE again, as my quant score was lower than I would have liked. 150 quant, 162 verbal. I feel like I understand all the mathematical concepts and just need to practice so I can be quicker. I was scrambling and making guesses at the end ?.

[St0chastic]

11 hours ago, Psychgrad27 said:

Thanks, yeah I am going to apply. I may take the GRE again, as my quant score was lower than I would have liked. 150 quant, 162 verbal. I feel like I understand all the mathematical concepts and just need to practice so I can be quicker. I was scrambling and making guesses at the end ?.

I would recommend using a combination of Magoosh, Khan Academy, and the Manhattan 5 lb. Book of GRE Practice Problems. If you spend 20-25 hours/week for a month or two practicing GRE problems, your score should go up pretty dramatically. There are only so many types of math problems tested on the GRE, so once you master them all you should find that the test isn't all that difficult. Like you I found the hardest part was learning how to consistently solve all the problems quickly, but after extensive practice this was no longer an issue.

[Psychgrad27]

Right. There are only so many kinds of problems. I think I'm going to change my approach so that instead of just doing practice sets that look just like the GRE, I will try and identify which kinds of problems slow me down and compile practice sets with just one type of problem each and focus on one set per day. Thinking then with repetition like that it will become more automatic so that instead of doing a logical walkthrough of how to solve a problem, I can just recognize it and start working. Once it becomes familiar, then I can incorporate it into the whole. Kind of how practicing piano used to work--plays the part that's giving me trouble over and over then go and play the whole piece. Gonna test that hypothesis anyway...

Edited November 27, 2016 by Psychgrad27

[St0chastic]

18 hours ago, Psychgrad27 said:

Thinking then with repetition like that it will become more automatic so that instead of doing a logical walkthrough of how to solve a problem, I can just recognize it and start working.

Yup, this is what I did. Honestly, I'm kind of shocked the quant GRE is setup the way it is. It just seems so trainable. The test is supposed to assess your ability to problem solve on the fly, but almost all of the problem types have some kind of "trick" that makes them almost trivially easy to solve. For instance, arithmetic series/sequence problems. When I first encountered these I didn't really know how I could solve them in under 60 seconds. But it turns out there's a trick that the brilliant mathematician Blaise Pascal discovered centuries ago that makes them one of the easier problems on the test.

If I ask you what's the sum of all the odd numbers from 3 to 105, your gut instinct might be that there's no easy way to answer this question without a calculator/program or extensive pen and paper calculations. Through Pascal's trick, however, we can work out the problem in just a few steps. If we pair the highest and lowest numbers, you get 105 + 3 = 108. If you then pair the second highest and lowest numbers, you get 103 + 5 = 108. So you can do this iteratively to keep getting pairs that sum to 108. Now we have to figure out how many pairs we have. Well, how many odd numbers are there from 3 to 105? Let's think about the odd sequence from 1 to 11 (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11). If we calculate the range of this series we get 11 - 1 = 10. Divide that by 2 and you get 5. But there are 6 rather than 5 odd numbers in the odd sequence 1 to 11. This is because you have to count inclusively (refer to this blog entry: http://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/inclusive-counting-on-the-gmat/). You then divide by 2 a second time to get the number of pairs in the sequence. So the formula to find the number of pairs of odd or even numbers in a sequence is simply ((range/2) + 1)/2. Now we multiply this number by the sum we calculated earlier to get our final answer: [(105-3)/2 + 1 ]/2 * 108 = 26 * 108. You can find this either by plugging into a calculator or with mental math (25 * 100 + 25 * 8 + 1 * 108 = 2500 + 200 + 108 = 2808). 

In the programming language R, you can verify this answer in two lines of code: 

odd_sequence <- seq(from = 3, to = 105, by = 2)
print(sum(odd_sequence))

The first time you solve a problem like this it might seem a little bit tricky and you probably won't be able to do it in under 60 seconds. But after practicing ten problems like this, they are a piece of cake. To get a score higher than 165 on quant, you just have to put in the time to learn all of these tricks and develop your pattern recognition ability. 

One thing I will say is that in my opinion it's better to mix up your practicing of different problem types rather than blocking them together. That is, don't just do a bunch of problems of type A followed by a bunch of problems of type B. This is technically known as interleaving in the learning literature and has a lot of empirical support for enhancing long-term learning: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-interleaving-effect-mixing-it-up-boosts-learning/ Blocking can be helpful when you are first learning how to do a particular type of problem, but to attain true mastery you have to follow this up with interleaved practice.

I don't want to sound like a shill for the website Magoosh, but in my opinion it is one of the most effective ways to boost your quant score in a relatively short span of time (1-2 months). Free alternatives like Khan Academy work pretty well, but they are not as tailored to the GRE as Magoosh is and they don't cover test taking strategies. Once you've learned the different problem types on the GRE, the next step is to solve a lot of practice problems. ETS writes the highest quality practice problems. Those can be found here (for free) and here (not free). For even more practice problems that are almost as good, I would use Manhattan's 5 lb. Book of Practice Problems.

I hope that helps and good luck!

Edited November 27, 2016 by St0chastic

[Psychgrad27]

Yeah, I meant I would start with "blocking" to gain familiarity then move into "interleaving" and put it into context making the brain be more active and work on its agility. I'll look into the resources available. Thanks! I appreciate it!