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Hi! CMICU nurse here. Planning on applying to CRNA school in the near future. I have all the requirements for application, just need to take the GRE. Can anyone give me an idea on what this will cover/what the test is like? Thanks in advance.
On the ETS website there is PowerPrep II software, available for free that mimics the exam. I would recommend utilizing this rather than paying for the exam to guide your studying. Plenty of resources to help guide your studying, however, if you are confident, you could definitely take the exam and do well at your "test run" and not have to take it over. I know a few people who did that.. I, on the other had, had to take it 2 times because my first score was not what I wanted to achieve.
I only took it once and i made a 295 with a written score of 3.5. I'm 31 and been out of school for a while...I studied for 3 months while working full time night shift and being a single mom so I was pretty happy with that score. I'm not worried much about it...seems your experience and interviews matter more and i think soon most won't even require gre.
ProgressiveThinking, MSN, CRNA
456 Posts
All I wanted was > 300, which I got. I pretty much did a magoosh practice test to see what my weaknesses were. Then I read the ETS book (made by the GRE folks) in order to learn how the test is administered and what they're looking for exactly. I studied about half of the Magoosh vocab words and maybe saw only a couple on the test. I didn't practice writing at all, but still received a 5.0 (writing has always been a strength of mine though). I used the basic essay format that I was taught during sophomore year in high school.
Unless you were an English lit major, the verbal section is for the most part a guessing game. It all comes down to the process of elimination and test taking strategies. The best thing you can do to boost your score is study high school math. I mostly read up on math concepts in the ETS book and just read through the rationales of the answers that they give you. I suck at math, but I still scored a 150 just by understanding concepts and not sweating small details. Keep in mind, I SUCKED at math, and was super happy about my score. Most of the quantitative section requires you to either answer a multiple choice question or choose the larger quantity between two equations. This is actually much easier than having to find an exact answer since you can ballpark it.
Like another poster said, just schedule a date. You can always retake the test and use the score select option to send schools whichever score you want.