Physics GRE Discussion Forums

Hi, i'm a little confused.

ETS website says I cannot bring my calculator.
But what if I need one for solving problems?

There seems to be many problems like that in the practice booklet...

No calculators, no cellphones, no watches, no slide-rules, no mechanical pencils.

Practice doing the math with pen and paper, use 3 for pi and 10 for g.

Rounding helps, there aren't a whole lot of problems that want the answer to within more than a factor of ten. You can mark down those that do require more accuracy and come back to them later.

Yea, problems where you have to derive a theoretical formula are often separated by factors of two, but most number-crunching problems where you have to multiply and divide lots of numbers/constants in scientific notation have answers separated by factors of 10 or more. So you can do some rounding...

electron mass = 10^-30...

Thank you all for the information.

But I still think I'm going to stumble a little upon number-crunchings,
things like wavelength = 550 nm, and trying to find the inverse for it...

For example... for the problem #62, I had to do 1.6/6400 X10^-19,
and got the right answer. I guess supposedly, all you need to know
is that 1.6/6400 can be easily calculated by deducing it to the ratio of1/4?

Well... Still!

You can find 1/550 pretty quickly using long division, but I doubt that would be necessary. Why not just round down to 500 nm, and find 1/500?

This is the physics GRE and as such I guess they expect you to be able to do mathematical manipulations like 1.6/6400 without breaking a sweat.