<p>I am currently a 2nd->3rd year civil engineering undergrad at ucdavis. I was hoping I could get some questions answered here.</p>
<p>Testing:
I should start taking my GRE and EIT junior year, correct?
Is the EIT basically all about passing or do they compare scores for graduate admissions?
How many times did you take each of the tests and how did you prepare?
Are the GRE/EIT tests just like the SATs in that you can take it as many times as you like and they take the highest score?</p>
<p>Graduate School:
5. Do graduate schools look mostly at overall,major, or upper div GPA?
6. When do most people start applying for graduate school?
7. Where do I get more information about each graduate school program? There doesn’t seem to be an incredible amount of resources with admissions stats and such as undergraduate programs do.</p>
<p>You don’t find out your score from the EIT, you only get a pass/fail. I doubt grad schools even care about the test as it’s only really used as an initial test to see if you can take the PE exam later on in your career. And, in order to be eligible for the PE exam you need a few years of actual experience in industry.</p>
<p>You other questions can probably be answered nicely by the Admissions 101 thread at the top of this forum.</p>
<p>The EIT exam – actually, it’s properly called the FE (Fundamentals of Engineering) exam – has nothing whatsoever to do with graduate school admissions. As the poster above noted, it’s essentially Part 1 of the PE exam. If you are planning to eventually get your PE license (and only a small percentage of engineers actually do), then I would advise you to take the FE exam at the end of your senior year to make sure that you have covered all of the necessary topics in your classes. (It’s offered twice a year – in April and October.) You can also take it after you graduate, but the longer you wait, the more review time you will need before taking the test because you’ll begin to forget some of the things you learned in school.</p>
<p>You will not get a score from the FE exam – only a Pass/Fail indication. You can take it as many times as you need to in order to pass.</p>
<p>The GRE is the exam normally used for graduate school admissions. You can take it as many times as you like to try and better your score. It’s a computer-based test and you can usually take it any time during the year, although students usually take it in the spring of their junior year or the summer between junior and senior years in order to have the test scores available for their grad school applications, which are usually due in Dec. or Jan.</p>
<p>hi i was civileng at UCD too and just now finished my Masters in structural!! glad to help an aggie out!</p>
<ol>
<li><p>junior is a good year to start. you can probably take your EIT this Oct, so remember to apply as i remember the deadline for it is around july. you should take the GRE too around the spring of junior year as well.</p></li>
<li><p>no one really cares about the EIT, not grad schools at least. it only helps when you need to get your PE. just take it, it’s easy, everyone (civil) gets it. you can probably pass with very little of studying.</p></li>
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<p>3&4. you should probably take the GRE 3 times the most even though you can take it as many times as you like, just like the SAT. i only took it once because i didn’t have enough time to take it the second time. don’t make the same mistake i had. fortunately it was good enough for my applications. I actually barely studied for it because i was studying for the PE at the same time. so i did horribly on Verbal but they didn’t really care… but i did use flash cards to study for vocab even tho it didn’t really help. Q part, well it’s easy math you just need to know how they grade you on GRE. for the EIT, just borrow a EIT book and do the practice problems… it basically is what you learned the first 3 years of college so you should still remember it.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>they look at all of them i believe. they might ask you for your major GPA, or the upper div GPA or they might calculate them themselves. different schools view these GPA’s differently so it’s hard for me to say.</p></li>
<li><p>grad school app are usually due around dec for the fall quarter in the following year. and in order to give the profs enough time to write LOR’s you should ask them about 2-3 months prior to your applications’ deadline and you need to have your SOP ready for their use. so i would say around july after your junior year you should start looking at the applications and LOR’s. however, i know some schools’ application sites won’t be available until august or sept.</p></li>
<li><p>go to the program’s site. or use search function on this forum</p></li>
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<p>and seriously, check out worried_mom’s link</p>