This guest post comes from Yun Ye, who is not only interning at VOA this semester, but also applying to graduate school. She recently attended an information session for her top choice school, and came back with a new perspective on the role of the GRE in admissions.
More and more Chinese students are attending graduate school in the U.S. – 88,429 at last count, an increase of 15% from the previous year – and how to get into the dream school is something weighing on the minds of many Chinese students.
Among my friends in China who, like me, wanted to pursue higher education in the U.S., the conversation was often about what schools we were planning to apply to and how we planned to get in – and when we thought about how we planned to get in, we often thought about our test scores.
In Chinese education, grades are the most important thing to a student. When I was at school, I remember striving for an excellent grade had been almost everyone’s goal. With that mentality, when my friends and former classmates started applying to U.S. grad schools, they put a lot of pressure on themselves to get a high score on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). The GRE is a standardized test required for admission at most graduate schools.
People who got a good score on the GRE would share their study experiences on online forums, which others would read in the hopes of emulating their performance. Chinese students preparing to study abroad get very familiar with forums such as “Xiaomaguohe.com,” “Taisha” or “Jituo.”
I also know people who spent a lot of money on classes to prepare for the GRE test, and people who dedicated a couple of months to studying; some people even took half a year to study.
I’m sure all that studying will eventually pay off in their scores, but I learned something valuable when I visited graduate schools recently in preparation for my own applications: the GRE score isn’t as important as my Chinese classmates made it out to be.