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logicbuttonI just finished the GRE practice exam. I'm taking the test on Tuesday morning, at 8:00 a.m., because it seemed like a good idea when I registered for it.
I got an 800 on the quantitative. So okay, sure, that's good because I'm a math major and that's my thing that I do, but man was I worried there, because some of those questions were really hard. It occurs to me now that I should have realized that that was a good thing, because it meant I was getting them right, but my mind was elsewhere. I was so ridiculously and unnecessarily nervous. Feeling pressured to live up to expectations, I guess, though whose expectations I was being pressured to live up to, I really couldn't tell you.
I got a 650 on the verbal. Nothing to say about that, really; just that it was better than I expected. I had never heard a lot of those words before. The analogies were a lot harder than expected, and the antonyms were hard too, though I was expecting that. I imagine the sentence completion questions helped my score some.
The writing sections went all right; I used up all of the allotted time, but was able to finish in both cases. I hope my arguments made sense. I can actually form pretty strong cases in my head for things I care about, but the minute I try to write them down, it's all over the place. It didn't help that the question (especially in the argument criticism section) took up most of the page, so it took a lot of scrolling to get from the top to the bottom of my little three-paragraph essays. I mean, 640x480; who even has that kind of resolution? My monitor is 1280x800, and the text I'm typing right this very minute still looks teeny.
Overall, it did go quite well. I actually didn't do as well on this practice test as I did on the SAT, which is how I sort of expected it to turn out. I did somewhat better on the math, and significantly worse on the verbal, which I was also expecting. Ha. Oh college, you've done such good work polarizing my skills. But percentile-wise, I was very satisfied. I hear that 50th percentile on the math is higher than that on verbal, so people do better on that section in general, but did you know that even a perfect score is still "only" 97th percentile? What's up with that? And why do I still not have any math-related icons?
I got an 800 on the quantitative. So okay, sure, that's good because I'm a math major and that's my thing that I do, but man was I worried there, because some of those questions were really hard. It occurs to me now that I should have realized that that was a good thing, because it meant I was getting them right, but my mind was elsewhere. I was so ridiculously and unnecessarily nervous. Feeling pressured to live up to expectations, I guess, though whose expectations I was being pressured to live up to, I really couldn't tell you.
I got a 650 on the verbal. Nothing to say about that, really; just that it was better than I expected. I had never heard a lot of those words before. The analogies were a lot harder than expected, and the antonyms were hard too, though I was expecting that. I imagine the sentence completion questions helped my score some.
The writing sections went all right; I used up all of the allotted time, but was able to finish in both cases. I hope my arguments made sense. I can actually form pretty strong cases in my head for things I care about, but the minute I try to write them down, it's all over the place. It didn't help that the question (especially in the argument criticism section) took up most of the page, so it took a lot of scrolling to get from the top to the bottom of my little three-paragraph essays. I mean, 640x480; who even has that kind of resolution? My monitor is 1280x800, and the text I'm typing right this very minute still looks teeny.
Overall, it did go quite well. I actually didn't do as well on this practice test as I did on the SAT, which is how I sort of expected it to turn out. I did somewhat better on the math, and significantly worse on the verbal, which I was also expecting. Ha. Oh college, you've done such good work polarizing my skills. But percentile-wise, I was very satisfied. I hear that 50th percentile on the math is higher than that on verbal, so people do better on that section in general, but did you know that even a perfect score is still "only" 97th percentile? What's up with that? And why do I still not have any math-related icons?
