I hate it. How does knowing the Distance Formula have any bearing on my ability to conduct research?
Does anyone else feel this way?
I was going to take the GRE after last semester, but I put my classes over studying, so now I’m gonna wait until after I get back from studying abroad this semester.
I’m dreading it more than anything.
Are there programs out there that don’t care about the GRE?
In order to be fair to all students applying to graduate school, there has to be a way to measure skills and further abilities. Conducting research requires all kinds of statistical data analysis. You have to be able to do the math.
The work that I do is vastly qualitative. And in the GRE prep that I’ve done, there were no stats questions (maybe probability, but nothing super intensive like what a sociologist might do).
Well, what I know of grad schools is that most require the GRE for admittance. Since you can’t or won’t take the GRE, you should try to find a program that allows you admittance without a GRE. That will be difficult.
During my undergrad, I had work-study at the department of Social Work. I received calls from tentative students who refused to take the GRE on “principle”, they weren’t admitted into the university. It’s the university’s call, not the department’s. All you have to do is take the test. After the test, it is up to the department to admit or reject you based on your vitae. The only way you’ll know if you have a chance of being admitted is if you take the test; otherwise, conducting research will be on your own dime, with an undergrad degree.
I’m in a program at school that requires that I take the GRE, so I will be taking it.
Well, each program looks at the parts of the GRE which are relevant to them. if it is a STEM field, then the quantitative part is important. Other programs will focus on the verbal.
Two things.
One, the GRE is largely a reasoning test. The two multiple-choice sections are called Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning. They want to know about your reasoning ability - your ability to solve problems and think logically. They don’t care whether you know the distance formula, either; what they DO care about is whether you can use your wits and knowledge to answer the questions correctly. I don’t remember the distance formula either, but if you gave me two points on a plane, I could find the distance between them by deriving the formula given what I know about basic algebra and geometry.
That’s why the questions are really only up to like 10th grade level math; they are less concerned with the breadth of your mathematical knowledge than they are with your problem-solving skills. Similarly with the verbal section - they want to make sure that you have verbal facility that enables you to read graduate-level texts. You don’t actually have to memorize all of those GRE words; you just have to be really good at figuring out what words mean in context, and how to extract meaning from a boring passage.
There are a few basic stats questions on the GRE - they are called “data analysis” type questions.
Data analysis topics include basic descriptive statistics, such as mean, median, mode, range, standard deviation, interquartile range, quartiles and percentiles; interpretation of data in tables and graphs, such as line graphs, bar graphs, circle graphs, boxplots, scatterplots and frequency distributions; elementary probability, such as probabilities of compound events and independent events; random variables and probability distributions, including normal distributions; and counting methods, such as combinations, permutations and Venn diagrams. These topics are typically taught in high school algebra courses or introductory statistics courses. Inferential statistics is not tested.
But in order to do complex statistical analyses you need to know basic math - algebra and geometry. So if you can do the very basic, high-school level math on the GRE then you are prepared to learn the higher-level statistical stuff you need for data analysis. Conversely, professors may reason, if you can’t even do the basic math on the GRE how will you be able to perform the high-level stuff?
Remember that the GRE is a general test, designed to be administered to students in all kinds of fields - from English literature and history to physics and mathematics. If quantitative facility doesn’t matter in your field (as it would not in literature or history), then you probably don’t need to worry too much about your quantitative score. If verbal facility is less important (as it might be in physics and math), then you wouldn’t need to worry so much about that section. If you are in a social science, though, I would say that quant matters at least a little (except perhaps for anthro, and even then it depends on the kind of anthro and the specific department).
^ I’m in cultural anthro.
Then your quant score probably won’t matter too much 
YES