The GRE Subject Test
Psychology
Patricia Taylor-Cooke
Drew C. Appleby
Overview
• What is the subject test?
• How and when is it administered?
• How is the subject test scored?
• What are the content areas?
• What are the questions like?
• How to prepare long-term and short-term.
• Why is the subject test important?
• What about guessing?
Do any of these sound
familiar?
• The subject test is not an important selection criteria.
• I was told not to worry about the subject test score.
• I don’t need to prepare. You either know it or you don’t.
• I was told to just go take it and get it out of the way.
• I should guess even if I don’t know an answer.
What is the Subject
Test?

It is an achievement test for psychological
concepts and facts.

It consists of approximately 220 multiple
choice questions with 5 options for each
question.
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
How and when is the Subject
Test administered?
 Pencil and paper administration only
 Offered three times each year
• November
• December
• April
 You will have 2 hours and 50 minutes
• That is about 45 seconds per question
How is the test scored?
 Maximum Range of Scaled Scores = 200 - 900
• Usually Smaller (400 – 700)
 Ranges Differ Across Versions Because
Difficulty Levels Vary Across Different
Versions
 Raw Score = Total Correct – (Total Incorrect / 4)
 Raw Score is Then Converted to a Scaled Score
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
How is the Test Scored?
 2 Subscores
• Experimental or Natural Science Oriented
• Social or Social Science Oriented
• Range = approximately 20 – 99 (Depends
on Difficulty Level of the Test)
 You ARE Penalized for Guessing
• ¼ of your wrong answers will be subtracted from
your total correct answers when your raw
score is determined
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
What are the Content Areas?
 There
are Three Content Areas
 Experimental or Natural Science Oriented
Learning
Memory
Language
Thinking
Perception
Ethology
Sensation
Physiological
Comparative Psychology
• Comprises about 43% of Exam
• Contributes to the Experimental Subscore
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
What are the Content Areas?
 Social or Social Science Oriented
Clinical
Developmental
Abnormal
Personality
Social
• Comprises about 43% of Exam
• Contributes to Social Subscore
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
What are the Content Areas?
 General
History
Measurement
Statistics
Applied Psychology
Research Design
• Comprises only about 14% of the Exam
• Does NOT Contribute to a Subscore
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
What are the Questions Like?
 22–32% are likely to be on Learning, Language,
Memory, Thinking & Perception
A student is attempting to train a dog to salivate to a tone at a given
frequency. The student’s procedure on each of 100 trials is to
present food powder, then to present a brief tone, and then to
measure the dog’s salivation to the tone presented alone. The major
problem with this procedure is that
a) Salivation is an inappropriate UCR
b) Dogs often fail to pay attention to the CS when it is a tone of
unvarying frequency
c) Extinction will take place on some of the trials
d) The UCS precedes the CS rather than vice versa
e) The UCR is not sufficiently similar to the CR
(GRE: Practicing to
Take the Psychology
Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
Chomsky’s theories of language include which of the following?
I.
Language acquisition can be explained by the principles of
classical and operant conditioning.
II.
There is an underlying abstract structure of language that is
different from the surface structure of language in speech.
III. The young child has an innate ability or predisposition to
acquire appropriate grammatical speech.
a) I only
b) II only
c) III only
d) I and II only
e) II and III only
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
When you wiggle a pencil rapidly in front of your eyes, you can see
a “ghost” of the pencil that seems to be in several places at once.
This illusion is attributable primarily to which of the following in
human information processing?
a) Feature detection
b) Short-term memory
c) Long-term memory
d) Sensory information storage
e) Pattern recognition
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
 3–7% are likely to be on Ethology and
Comparative Psychology
In a sexually reproducing species with haploid gametes and zygotes
that are all diploid, a parent, on average, shares half of his or her
genes with those of an offspring. In this species, the coefficient of
relationship between two half siblings is
a) 1/16
b) 1/8
c) 1/4
d) 1/2
e) 1/1
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
An earthworm is exposed to a series of air puffs directed at its
head. The earthworm responds to the first few trials by backing
away from the source of the air puffs, but in the subsequent trials
the earthworm ceases to withdraw. This change in behavior is most
likely the result of
a) Discrimination learning
b) Avoidance learning
c) Habituation
d) Sensitization
e) Latent learning
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
 9–13% are likely to be on Sensory and
Physiological Psychology
Sleep research best supports which of the following statements?
a) Not everyone dreams
b) Dreams commonly last only a few seconds
c) People are not aware that they are dreaming
d) The content of dreams can be influenced by suggestions during
wakefulness
e) Sleepwalking occurs largely in rapid-eye-movement (REM)
sleep
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
The physical energy of a stimulus is converted by sensory receptors
into neural impulses by a process known as
a) Assimilation
b) Accommodation
c) Transposition
d) Transduction
e) Trace consolidation
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
 10–14% are likely to be on Abnormal and Clinical
Psychology
Karen Horney emphasized that neurotic needs are expressed in
which of the following ways?
a) Direct aggression, passive aggression, and detachment
b) Psychopathic deviance, dissociation, and development of
conversion reactions
c) Striving for superiority, becoming excessively compliant, and
becoming insulated
d) Psychosis and disorganization, destructive acting out, and
excessive concern for order
e) Movement toward people, movement away from people, and
movement against people
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
The physical energy of a stimulus is converted by sensory receptors
into neural impulses by a process known as
a) Assimilation
b) Accommodation
c) Transposition
d) Transduction
e) Trace consolidation
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
 10–14% are likely to be on Developmental
Psychology.
According to Piaget, which of the following is established by the
end of the sensorimotor period?
a) Reversibility
b) The use of representation
c) Concrete operational thinking
d) The understanding of conservation
e) The understanding of class relation
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
Which of the following statement best characterizes the position of
the Soviet theorists Vygotsky and Luria concerning the relationship
between language and thought?
a) Language is important for the development of concrete but not
abstract thinking.
b) Thinking becomes more egocentric as language develops during
the preschool years.
c) The development of language lags one stage behind the
development of thinking.
d) Language and thinking are unrelated to one another in
development.
e) Language is an important tool for the development of abstract
thinking.
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
 5-9% are likely to be on Personality Psychology.
The psychologist who has been most critical of the assumptions
regarding traits that underlie personality tests is
a) Walter Mischel
b) Carol Jackson
c) Anne Anastasi
d) Grant Dahlstrom
e) Leona Tyler
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
To use the empirical, criterion-keying approach to constructing a
personality inventory, a researcher would select items that
a) Discriminate among the various criterion groups
b) Have content relevant to various personality types
c) Have a high correlation with each other and a low correlation
with outside criteria
d) Have empirically proven high p values
e) Provide a normal distribution of total test scores
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
 10-14% are likely to be on Social Psychology.
Attitude change produced by a perceived threat to personal
freedom is due to which of the following?
a) Dissonance
b) Reactance
c) Overjustification
d) Deindividuation
e) Anchoring
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
A well-known study by Asch of individual conformity to group
norms suggests that
a) Most people are conformists
b) Conformity is greatly increased by uniformity of group opinion
c) Large groups are ineffective in inducing conformity
d) Males and females tend to conform to the same degree
e) outer-directed people conform less than do inner-directed people
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
 11-17% are likely to be on History of Psychology,
Applied Psychology, Measurement, Research
Design, and/or Statistics.
The idea that memory for complex events is frequently
reconstructive rather than reproductive, in a literal sense, is
associated historically with which of the following?
a) Hermann Ebbinghaus
b) Anne Anastasi
c) Leo Postman
d) Frederic Bartlett
e) E. L. Thorndike
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
If a set of scores with a mean of 27 and a variance of 9 is
transformed to a set of z-scores, the standard deviation of the
transformed scores will be
a) 0
b) 1
c) 3
d) 9
e) 81
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
The multitrait-multimethod technique formulated by Campbell and
Fiske was introduced primarily to evaluate a test’s
a) Content validity
b) Concurrent validity
c) Face validity
d) Construct validity
e) Predictive validity
(GRE: Practicing to Take the Psychology Test 3rd Ed., 1994)
How do I Prepare for the
Subject Test?
 Long-Term
 Short-Term
Long-Term Preparation
 Planning Your Semesters and Classes

Plan Semesters Ahead of Time
• Design an Education Plan for the Rest of Your
Undergraduate Career (Presentation Coming Soon)
• Meet with an Advisor
• Choose a Course Sequence to Benefit Your Future
Long-Term Preparation
 Planning Your Semesters and Classes

Choose Core Classes Based on Subject Test
Coverage such as…
• Cognition & Learning – take the semester before you plan
to take the test since this is 23 - 32% of the test
• Behavioral Neuroscience – since this is 9-13% of the
test and contributes to the experimental subscore
• Look at the percentage of coverage for core classes and
plan from that perspective, saving specialty classes
to take later or last
Long-Term Preparation
 Getting the Most Out of Your Classes

Approach Each Class as a Partial Ticket to
Your Future
• Be active in learning
• Understand the material – not just memorizing for the
exams
• Learn to apply concepts to your life and those around you
• Meet with your professor when you don’t understand a
concept – that is what they are there for
Long-Term Preparation
 Getting the Most Out of Your Classes

Begin a Notebook of People and Their
Contributions
• Buy a 3 ring binder that can be added to throughout all
classes
• Jot down each theorist/researcher and their important
studies, discoveries and findings
• Will help to consolidate to memory and can be used as a
review – double benefit!
Short-Term Preparation
 Take a Practice Test

You will receive one practice test when you
register – then order an additional book (can
be found on www.amazon.com)
• Take a practice test to determine weak areas
• Track questions you guessed to determine whether guessing
will benefit you
• Gives you an idea of your score and whether you are ready
Short-Term Preparation
 Obtain a Comprehensive Introductory
Psychology Textbook

Read chapters covering your weak areas
• A highly recommended book and considered to be one of
the most comprehensive introductory textbooks is:
Psychology by Henry Gleitman – Can be found on
www.amazon.com - $60.00 new & $38.50 used (as of
May 2002)
• Other books can also be found on www.amazon.com
Why Is the Subject Test
Important?
 Found to be an Important Predictor of
Graduate School Success
Kuncel, N. R., Hezlett, S. A., & Ones, D. S. (2001). A comprehensive metaanalysis of the predictive validity of the graduate record
examinations: Implications for graduate student selection and
performance. Psychological Bulletin, 127 (1), 162-181.
• They concluded from their meta-analysis of 1,753
samples that the Subject Test is a better predictor of
graduate school success than the Verbal, Quantitative,
or Analytical Tests.
• The addition of Subject Test Scores to any composite (i.e.,
Verbal + Quantitative + Subject) leads to a noticeable
improvement in prediction of graduate school success.
What do the results of that
study mean for me?
 May Lead to a Stronger Emphasis
Being Placed on Subject Test Scores
 May Lead to More Schools Requiring
the Subject Test
What about guessing?
 Be careful because you are penalized for guessing
(¼ of your wrong answers will be
subtracted from your total number of correct
answers)
 Depends on your definition of guessing
 If you can eliminate at least two of your choices, then
you may want to guess.
 If you have no idea which answer is correct, then skip It.
Review
• What is the subject test?
• How and when is it administered?
• How is the subject test scored?
• What are the content areas?
• What are the questions like?
• How to prepare long-term and short-term.
• Why is the subject test important?
• What about guessing?
• This is one part of the ticket to your future!!!