₦airaland Forum

sirRiddy:
Got this from an applicant for grad school and thought this might
be helpful to those preparing for the GRE

Dear Bleep,

Help me out with this first: Which is your given name and which is your family name? I see one order in your salutation and another order in your email address.
In some cultures, such as in England and the US, one introduces oneself with first name followed by last name. In Belgium or Poland, however, one normally introduces oneself in the reverse order with last name first and then one’s given name.
With Nigerian names, I unfortunately in most cases do not have enough contextual knowledge.

Your coursework sounds interesting and promising and gives reason for cautious optimism. If your quantitative section GRE score turn out to be high, you would be a competitive applicant in terms of preparedness for our demanding research methods sequence. A high score also would compensate for some of the doubt people might have given the absence of algebra in your courses even though some of the titles do suggest a sufficient level of mathematics.

The GRE should be approached with great seriousness and I would strongly encourage you to carefully prepare. No one preparation method has decisive properties. You must find what works best for you. Do take several practice tests.

Based on my experience with applicants from outside the US (that includes myself), I would like to suggest that you also look very closely at the analytical writing portion of the GRE. While the Verbal and Quantitative portions of the GRE are multiple choice, the analytical writing portion requires you to write some kind of essay. The score on this portion of the test is the most frequent stumbling block and area of poor performance for international students.

The Educational Testing Service (ETS), the company that creates the GRE, claims that it makes no difference where you come from but reality can be different. Think of it this way: Tens of thousands of these handwritten analytical writing essays are evaluated each year by humans. The only way to have consistency across the people marking these is to use a template. The template and associated guidelines come from a particular cultural and linguistic perspective. That is where differences in culture and language and maintaining language skill under time pressure can negatively affect the non-English test taker and even those who come from societies where English is the lingua franca. It isn’t the same English and the patterns are different. To use an example, I can almost always recognize when a European Francophone is the author of an English text because there is a distinct pattern of thought that becomes visible no matter how skilled the author’s English.

So, when you work on this part of the test, think of the task as writing an essay addressed to a specifically American audience in response to a question they have asked you. It would be wise to read several GRE guide books (including books not published by ETS itself) on how to approach the analytical writing section.
Quite aside from the effect on one’s admissions probabilities, I should point out that access to financial assistance at the University of Arkansas for students in the form of fellowships is heavily influenced by the GRE score.
The university’s fellowship committee requires a minimum 4.0 score on the analytical writing portion in order to even consider someone for a fellowship.

As to the TOEFL test: You will have to address your questions to the international admissions office at the graduate school of the University of Arkansas. They set the policy regarding whether TOEFL is a requirement.

My department provides a $13,600 graduate assistantship to every person who is admitted. However, this is insufficient to satisfy the income requirements for a student visa. You must receive a fellowship on top of the graduate assistantship. You will understand why I put so much emphasis on careful GRE preparation.

Best regards,

xxxxx, Ph.D.
Chief of Staff and Graduate Coordinator
Department of xx
University of Bleep
202 Graduate Education Building
Fayetteville, AR 72701
(479) 575-

Pls I need help, I was denied a visa in 2015, now I have just received my i-20 to study business administration and I'm 34 years of age, what is my chances of getting it this time and secondly I left sec school since 2001 and learnt a trade from 2004 to 2006