Pending Verification
I took the GRE this afternoon. I arrived at 10:30am like I was told, but yet I didn’t start filling out any paperwork until 11:10am and then didn’t start my test until 11:16am (they keep track of the time for record keeping). Though I must say I was proud of myself for not falling asleep in the waiting room. Well, hell, I was proud that I didn’t get tired during the test; I fell asleep during the SAT, after all.
There are two important factors to a computerized test:
First, they will choose the next question based on your previous performance. In other words, they make it as hard as you are capable of doing all of the time. The worst part of that is then that you feel like you are not doing very well at all the whole time because there are never any “easy” questions. With that said, I felt like I was doing absolutely terrible on this thing and almost ran out of time on it. There is no penalty for guessing and so I definitely guessed in the math section to save time for problems I could actually solve.
Second, they will give you your scores on the multiple-choice sections immediately. I got 550 on the verbal and 720 on the quantitative. My writing scores won’t come out for a while because someone has to actually read the essays I wrote and score them. However, judging from my overall ability to write and comparing to the samples, I suspect I will score a 5 on that section. But I will not be suprised by a 4 either.
So, pending verification, it can be said that I got a combined score somewhere in the 1870-1970 range which is good. Even the least restrictive grad schools cut off at like 1700 and the best around 2000. So, I am pleased. I don’t intend to retake the test, I am confident that I could not do any better (in fact I did worse on the practice test).
