But before I gave up hope, I decided to download the practice test from the GRE website and do it cold today after lunch. 215 problems in 170 minutes, following the classic paper-based multiple choice format. You get one point for every correct answer and lose 1/4 points for every incorrect answer. Any question you leave blank does not affect your score either way. I chose to guess on any question where I could narrow the answers down to 3 possibilities.
While taking the test, I realized that I know basically nothing about biological/neurological psychology, though. I have never taken a course in it and have not picked up any of this knowledge anywhere else.
I got a 660, which is the 81st percentile. That's not fabulous or anything, but perfectly okay for my purposes (and impressive to me, given how long I've had to forget this). If I could just take the 660 and have it put on my permanent record, I'd be fine with that. Of course, now I have to decide whether it's worth putting a little bit of review time in and taking the damn thing, or skipping it entirely. (I don't feel comfortable going into the real test cold because no doubt I overperformed in my testing conditions due to being unstressed and comfortable and all that.) But at least I don't feel now that I would have to put a huge amount of effort into doing adequately on the test.
This decision process never ends.
The grading sheet for the practice included the percentage of people who took this actual test in November 1999 and got the right answer, so I could see where I most differed from the average psychology test-taker.
Only 10% of test-takers (and I) got this one:
"Complex representations consist of an activation pattern of many individual units that have simple on-off functions. This theoretical view of memory representation is modeled on the actual nervous system and is known as:
A) connectionism
B) information processing theory
C) the ACT* model
D) the Atkinson-Shiffrin model
E) encoding specificity theory"
85% of test-takers got this one, but I left it blank (though I did have a gut instinct about the correct answer that I did not follow through on):
"Subjects are presented with a randomly arranged list of animals, fruits, and tools, and then asked to recall the list in any order they wish. Their recall protocols are most likely to show which of the following?
A) The items with the same initial letters occur close together.
B) The items that rhyme occur close together.
C) The items that belong to the same conceptual category occur close together.
D) The items occur in an order highly similar to that used for presentation.
E) The items from only one of the conceptual categories are recalled."
The "easiest" question I actually gave the wrong answer to (and that 66% of test-takers got right) was one where I talked myself out of the right answer:
"Several abilities are measured repeatedly in the same participants at 55, 65, and 75 years of age. For which of the following measures would the observed decline with age be expected to be the most obvious?
A) Recall of factual knowledge
B) Senseory memory capacity
C) Reproduction of a simple abstract design from memory
D) Motor performance under time pressure
E) Comparative judgments of line lengths after controlling for individual differences in visual acuity"
The first one is A. The second one is C. The third one is D (I guessed C).
Winner of the Creepiest Sentence on the Psychology Exam Award goes to question #109:
"In a classic experiment on 'sham rage' in cats, the cats' cerebral cortexes were removed and the cats were exposed to noxious stimuli."
(Please note the "sham rage" experiment was conducted around 1925 and does not reflect what is going on in contemporary psychology laboratories.)
Elsewhere in the standardized testing world, Tam has been gearing up for the regular GRE exam and struggling with that too-common feeling of rebellion against the whole idea of preparing for the test.
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