Taking the GRE this morning stressed me out because I know this is a test for which you are supposed to study. However, I'm planning to enter graduate school for language (Arabic), and what gets you into the grad programs I'm looking at are actual skills in your target language, not the GRE. There's not a minimum GRE cutoff for language programs even at the best schools; it's more of a hoop you need to jump through in order to become a graduate student. Because my scores won't be considered very important by my future grad programs, the extent of my studying for this exam consisted of spending from 1-3 AM last night (this morning?) clicking through math concepts I've long since left behind (area and angle measure of an arc created by intersecting chords that do not pass through the center point of a circle? come on) and wondering how this was all going to go down.
The whole testing experience was stressful; I was head-singing and leg-bouncing the whole way through. The testing center (all the way out in Lindon, by the way) is more like the sterile area with the air shower and protective gear in my Harvard lab than it is like a normal classroom, all take-off-your-sweatshirt-empty-your-pockets-and-turn-around and no-go-back-you-enter-one-at-a-time-and-we-take-your-picture-with-the-surveillance-camera. These days the GRE is an avant-garde computer-adaptive exam, but its software is an unsettling throwback to like '90s MS-DOS; before you begin you have to go through an inane tutorial on how to click buttons on a mouse and select options on a screen (my favorite "don't do this" picture: the mouse sideways with someone's hand straight on top of it, palm upward). By the time you get to the actual test you are half expecting someone in grunge gear to pop out from behind you and start singing the Saved by the Bell theme song, and you're mentally confused and worn out by perusing every screen on the computer use tutorial despite the fact that you obviously know how to use a computer (but what if there's some function I need to access and I don't know about it and it screws up my test? I'd better read everything, just in case).
There's a writing section (2 essays, one on the logic of an argument and one on your perspective on an issue), a math section, and a verbal section on the GRE, and then there's an experimental research section. I was under the impression that I wouldn't be informed which section was experimental, but the program told me so in a big gray '90s dialog box and asked for my participation. I thought, hey, what the heck, I'm already here, but the real reason I think I agreed is that there's always that fear in the back of your mind that maybe if you don't participate in their research they'll round down your scores.
The worst part is that at the end of the GRE you have to look at your scores. To most people this might be considered a benefit, but I like distance between me and my test scores. I like to look at the letter that comes in the mail three weeks later and say, oh yeah, I remember taking that test, and then I don't stress about what specifically I missed because it's been so long I can't remember a thing. I clicked in to see my scores and immediately felt disappointed, which was not a surprise. I knew I would feel disappointed no matter what, because as a perfectionist I hate to see any errors in anything.
Overall, I know I could have done better on the verbal section (apparently there's strategy to this; the computer weights more heavily toward the beginning questions, so if you miss one of them you're screwed right off the bat and have to reclaim whatever semblance of dignity you can by answering the rest of the questions perfectly, which I think happened to me), but I was positively surprised at my math score. I expected a 750 in verbal and got a (unofficial; real scores appear in a few weeks) 650, and in math I expected a 550 and got a 680. So my overall score is respectable for a graduate applicant and about what I expected it to be (1330), but with a different distribution than I expected. I might take it again just to prove (to whom?) that my verbal skills are way better than my test reflects...but I think that's just the perfectionist in me speaking (not to say that I don't let her take control of what happens in my life 98% of the time).
The whole testing experience was stressful; I was head-singing and leg-bouncing the whole way through. The testing center (all the way out in Lindon, by the way) is more like the sterile area with the air shower and protective gear in my Harvard lab than it is like a normal classroom, all take-off-your-sweatshirt-empty-your-pockets-and-turn-around and no-go-back-you-enter-one-at-a-time-and-we-take-your-picture-with-the-surveillance-camera. These days the GRE is an avant-garde computer-adaptive exam, but its software is an unsettling throwback to like '90s MS-DOS; before you begin you have to go through an inane tutorial on how to click buttons on a mouse and select options on a screen (my favorite "don't do this" picture: the mouse sideways with someone's hand straight on top of it, palm upward). By the time you get to the actual test you are half expecting someone in grunge gear to pop out from behind you and start singing the Saved by the Bell theme song, and you're mentally confused and worn out by perusing every screen on the computer use tutorial despite the fact that you obviously know how to use a computer (but what if there's some function I need to access and I don't know about it and it screws up my test? I'd better read everything, just in case).
There's a writing section (2 essays, one on the logic of an argument and one on your perspective on an issue), a math section, and a verbal section on the GRE, and then there's an experimental research section. I was under the impression that I wouldn't be informed which section was experimental, but the program told me so in a big gray '90s dialog box and asked for my participation. I thought, hey, what the heck, I'm already here, but the real reason I think I agreed is that there's always that fear in the back of your mind that maybe if you don't participate in their research they'll round down your scores.
The worst part is that at the end of the GRE you have to look at your scores. To most people this might be considered a benefit, but I like distance between me and my test scores. I like to look at the letter that comes in the mail three weeks later and say, oh yeah, I remember taking that test, and then I don't stress about what specifically I missed because it's been so long I can't remember a thing. I clicked in to see my scores and immediately felt disappointed, which was not a surprise. I knew I would feel disappointed no matter what, because as a perfectionist I hate to see any errors in anything.
Overall, I know I could have done better on the verbal section (apparently there's strategy to this; the computer weights more heavily toward the beginning questions, so if you miss one of them you're screwed right off the bat and have to reclaim whatever semblance of dignity you can by answering the rest of the questions perfectly, which I think happened to me), but I was positively surprised at my math score. I expected a 750 in verbal and got a (unofficial; real scores appear in a few weeks) 650, and in math I expected a 550 and got a 680. So my overall score is respectable for a graduate applicant and about what I expected it to be (1330), but with a different distribution than I expected. I might take it again just to prove (to whom?) that my verbal skills are way better than my test reflects...but I think that's just the perfectionist in me speaking (not to say that I don't let her take control of what happens in my life 98% of the time).
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