Anyone take the PGRE this past weekend?

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Joemic314
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Apr 08, 2019 1:26 pm

Anyone take the PGRE this past weekend?

Post by Joemic314 » Mon Apr 08, 2019 1:32 pm

Didn't see any posts about it. How did you feel? I was surprised at how easy the majority of the problems were compaired to the past years exams I was using for practice. Anyone know if it takes the full 5 weeks to get scores?

Looking forward to getting to know some of you!

ms2019
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Apr 08, 2019 4:22 pm

Re: Anyone take the PGRE this past weekend?

Post by ms2019 » Mon Apr 08, 2019 4:25 pm

Hey, I took the exam! I actually ran out of time and found some questions hard to do. Last year's test was easy compared to 1996, 2001 and 2008, but this year's was harder than last year's imo.

Joemic314
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Apr 08, 2019 1:26 pm

Re: Anyone take the PGRE this past weekend?

Post by Joemic314 » Thu Apr 11, 2019 2:31 am

ms2019 wrote:Hey, I took the exam! I actually ran out of time and found some questions hard to do. Last year's test was easy compared to 1996, 2001 and 2008, but this year's was harder than last year's imo.
Ahh sorry to hear that. What was your strategy? I found it very helpful to aim on finishing with about an hour/45 mins left (by skipping hard questions) then using that time to tackle them after my brain worked on them in the background. I think you always run out of time, its a matter of minimizing the impact that has.

silon_the_sofa
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2019 11:13 am

Re: Anyone take the PGRE this past weekend?

Post by silon_the_sofa » Sun Apr 14, 2019 11:41 am

Hey,

I took the exam as well. I'm not sure what to make of it. I remember feeling glad towards the beginning because I was knocking the questions off one by one, then in the middle suddenly exhaustion set in and I started to get a bit pissed because I knew I was coming across questions that I should ordinarily answer quickly, but in the moment didn't have the energy to focus on, but I forced myself to skip past them for the time being so as to not just sink time- hit some of the "know it or you don't" questions instead. Then came back to them in the end and finished it off. So on the whole, I really can't say any more if it was easy, hard, or somewhere in between. I found there were a lot of questions where I had an intuitive sense of what the answer should be, but couldn't immediately prove it to myself. After the test, my obsession forced me to go through all of those questions and prove the answers formally and it turned out my intuition was right, but in a lot of the cases, it was a good 20 minutes worth of working through to prove definitely.

So yeah, all in all, I think there were 12 questions that I for sure know I answered wrong (it's hard enough to finish the whole test on time, let alone have time to go through and double check all your answers), another 8 that stuck in my head that may or may not have been correct (hard to check for sure because a lot of the questions aren't standard types of questions that people post online solutions to and also you need to remember the exact phrasing of the questions).

There is still one question though that sticks out in my head. I don't want to risk breaking any disclosure rules, so I'm not going to mention what the question was, but it felt to me like there were two reasonable answers that would theoretically work. I know in those cases you're meant to choose the one that best fits, but to me it felt like one is the practical answer, the other is the idolized answer, so it should probably be the practical answer. However, if it's already an idolized system, the practical answer should be impossible... So yeah, unfortunately, can't discuss exact questions because I am curious as to people's thoughts on that one, but it is what it is. We'll find out soon hopefully how it went.

Athul
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Apr 29, 2018 12:09 pm

Re: Anyone take the PGRE this past weekend?

Post by Athul » Mon Apr 15, 2019 9:10 am

I also took the April 6th exam. I ran out of time, I find some questions too hard for me as well as I din't find similar questions in any previous year question papers. Though there were some questions which repeated as such.
I traveled from South India to Bhutan for my exam, there was a total of 4 people, including me for Physics GRE. All of them were Indian's and what surprise me is that I din't find any Bhutaness students not just for physics GRE but for any subject GRE.

punter196
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Apr 17, 2019 12:04 am

Re: Anyone take the PGRE this past weekend?

Post by punter196 » Wed Apr 17, 2019 12:14 am

Hello everyone..
I am basically from Engineering background..
But I have been in Teaching Physics for IIT-JEE entrance in Pune from last 5 years
I am planning for Research in physics.
I appears for PGRE on 6th April in Colombo.
My experience was very nice..
I found almost 60-70% questions very simple and I solved them in my first attempt.. these questions were like 12th STD based..It was all that stuff that I teach students on daily basis.
But remaining questions from QM and Relativity I found difficult as I have never studied those topics in my graduation
But overall I wud say the paper was quite moderate level..
I am expecting 70+ correct answers
What do you think what will be the Scaled score out of 1000 if I get 70-75 questions right?

silon_the_sofa
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2019 11:13 am

Re: Anyone take the PGRE this past weekend?

Post by silon_the_sofa » Wed Apr 17, 2019 5:07 am

punter196 wrote:Hello everyone..
I am basically from Engineering background..
But I have been in Teaching Physics for IIT-JEE entrance in Pune from last 5 years
I am planning for Research in physics.
I appears for PGRE on 6th April in Colombo.
My experience was very nice..
I found almost 60-70% questions very simple and I solved them in my first attempt.. these questions were like 12th STD based..It was all that stuff that I teach students on daily basis.
But remaining questions from QM and Relativity I found difficult as I have never studied those topics in my graduation
But overall I wud say the paper was quite moderate level..
I am expecting 70+ correct answers
What do you think what will be the Scaled score out of 1000 if I get 70-75 questions right?
Hard to say what the scaled score will be, but based off of the rubrics from the released past exams, there's always some threshold above which every score is 990 that depends on the level of difficulty of the exam (which makes sense because the harder the exam, the more shifted down the distribution of raw scores will be, so the threshold will be set lower). Below that threshold, however, every 1-2 incorrect answers moves your score down by 10 marks, which is a bit brutal.

It's hard for me to guess the level of difficulty of the exam because I expect to score towards the higher end (what can I say, I did my undergrad at a top 10 global university, so I was trained well). Based on how difficult or not difficult I found the various past exams though, I'd guess the threshold will probably be around 80 +- 3? In which case a score of 70-75 could be anywhere between 850 and 900 (if the threshold is 84 like the 2017 exam), 880 and 920 (if the threshold is 82 like the 2008 exam), or 940 and 980 (if the threshold is 76 like the 1992 exam). The formats of the exams in 1992 and 2008 were different though; incorrect answers took off 1/4 of a mark each from your raw score, so naturally the threshold would be lower compared to if incorrect answers weren't penalized with deducted marks.

However, well done for 70+ correct answers. It's definitely a hard test and coming from engineering, I can imagine it's even more difficult for you because QM and relativity are not intuitive by any stretch. It had some conceptual QM questions that can be difficult if you're not well familiar with the actual postulates of QM. The atomic questions also weren't trivial and there were some scenarios that I had never encountered before either.

I remember about 50 of the questions that were on the exam, so I was able to see of the questions that I wasn't 100% sure on, what I got right and what I didn't. There's still one question that sticks out that I would love to know the actual answer to, but I just can't find an example of it online to check. And obviously I can't ask others on this forum about it because we can't reveal any of the questions. So I guess I'm stuck with my curiosity.



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