Relief
I've taken the GRE. It was horrible. The two essays were first and I was confronted with the fact that there is no substitute for the word technology. I don't think I've ever repeated the same word 25 times in an essay that is probably less that one page. Oh well. Apparently, grad schools don't even look at the essay scores. They are only worth 6 points while the rest of the test is worth 1600.
The one nice thing about the computer based GRE is that you get your score (except the essay scores) when you finish and before you pick which schools to send them to. The really, really, really bad thing about the computer based GRE is that you can't skip ahead and do all the ones you know before tackeling the more time consuming hard ones. I ran out of time on the math section. I believe I still had 6 or so left to do. This doesn't sound so bad, except that there were only about 28 questions. The math was really hard. Not higher level hard, I could have dealt with that. More like this triangle had an angle of ___ and this triangle has an angle of ___, how much longer would side x of triangle a need to be to make it 60% bigger than triangle b. Not that exactly, but questions like that.
I would have preferred integrals. At least that way, I wouldn't have felt dumb because I couldn't immediately solve it. And frankly, I would have been able to solve more of them.
Anyway, I actually did much better than I thought. Not as good as I could, but well enough that I won't take it again.
The one nice thing about the computer based GRE is that you get your score (except the essay scores) when you finish and before you pick which schools to send them to. The really, really, really bad thing about the computer based GRE is that you can't skip ahead and do all the ones you know before tackeling the more time consuming hard ones. I ran out of time on the math section. I believe I still had 6 or so left to do. This doesn't sound so bad, except that there were only about 28 questions. The math was really hard. Not higher level hard, I could have dealt with that. More like this triangle had an angle of ___ and this triangle has an angle of ___, how much longer would side x of triangle a need to be to make it 60% bigger than triangle b. Not that exactly, but questions like that.
I would have preferred integrals. At least that way, I wouldn't have felt dumb because I couldn't immediately solve it. And frankly, I would have been able to solve more of them.
Anyway, I actually did much better than I thought. Not as good as I could, but well enough that I won't take it again.