GRE: History Major

tesIII
Mon, 06 Jan 2014 14:55:45 +0000

The GRE is a reasoning test like the SAT. It creates a bell curve in people’s ability to do well on it not by taking you to the limits of your knowledge (it stays very much at the core of your knowledge) but by bombarding you with simple-seeming tricky questions that instill in most people an irresistible urge to choose the wrong answer. Cocking up positive and negative numbers, jumping to conclusions about something the writer meant to say but didn’t say, etc. You can miss, like, 2 questions per section and still get a perfect (depending, to be honest, on a LOT of other stuff), and I think if you miss about half the questions, that puts you at average.

As a history major, you may enjoy some of the writing excerpts. One or two of them is usually about history or something else in the humanities. In mine, I found a little gem I’m not supposed to divulge to you but beautifully sums up the role of history in the academy, which is to erase the other social sciences’ attempts to instill confidence that we can control our own destinies. Just remember not to have too much fun reading them, keep plowing through the questions.