Physics GRE 1777 Solutions

[mohamedabdelhafez]

Hello everyone!

I hope you are all doing well! This is Mohamed Abdelhafez, a postodc @ MIT. As ETS recently released a new physics GRE test (GR1777) https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/practice_book_physics.pdf, I have written down full solutions for it as part of a course I was teaching and you can find them here : http://www.mit.edu/~mohamedr/PGRE1777_solutions.pdf

I decided to share them as a tribute to this site and fellow sites that helped me a lot in my applications!

Please let me know if you have any comments/corrections, and best of luck to all of you who are starting this long journey of applying to physics PhD! Also, feel free to send me questions you have regarding grad life etc.

Mohamed

[MohamedIBrahim]

Thanks for your great effort

[mohamedabdelhafez]

Dear all,

As some typos were pointed out, I updated the file today with the most recent version, so please download it again!

[Qwaps]

I saw question 100 on the PGRE I took in April 2016. Such a fun question to finish the exam with

[Darrinallen]

Thanks for solutions. I am assuming this gr1777 exam is very representative of the actual exam

[phy94]

Can someone confirm the answer to question 100?

[pinchun]

I think the rms deviation of Prob.41 should be coming from
the binomial error, which is sqrt(N*p*(1-p)) = sqrt(100*0.1*0.9) = sqrt(9) = 3 rather
than sqrt(10), since this is a detect-or-not problem and should follow binomial
distribution rather than Poisson. Thanks!