GRE...finished!
I finally took the GRE today. I've been meaning to do this since Spring semester 2004, but it kept getting pushed back due to an increasing lack of urgency. Now of course I have to apply to schools by December, so it's urgent again, so now it's done. I have to sat the Adaptive aspect of the computerized testing threw me way off. The quantitative section got REALLY hard REALLY fast, but in a very subtle way, if that makes any sense. It was like...the first few questions weren't too bad, I answered them, and then I felt like my brain stopped functioning. It was that impotent feeling that suddenly nothing is making sense, none of the formulas are clicking in your head, but you're staring at the material and you THINK you should know how it works...it was so bad I briefly considered cancelling out of the test and taking it again later. I plugged along though, because at that point I'd already put in $130 and 90 minutes on the writing sections. Turned out I must have just nailed all the early questions, because my Quantitative score was pretty damn respectable in the end. Verbal went well too. My score there wasn't as high, but apparently lower scores on Verbal often relate to higher percentiles because too many math people have to take the GRE for engineering school or some such. (Found a website that said that a whopping 8% of people taking the GRE score 800s on the Quantitative section. This makes even respectable scores not-as-amazing percentile-wise.)
All in all I'm pretty happy with the scores I know thus far. (Both are higher than my friend in grad school at OU got...and she managed to get a grant, so maybe my chances aren't so bad.) I don't know about the actual writing section...I can string a sentence together and even punctuate when I choose to, but who knows. It's not going to keep me out of grad school or anything. I'm sending my Psych subject test scores to everybody too, even when it's not required, cuz I'm damn proud of that score. So maybe that'll make up for a bad writing score if it turns out sucky.
Now I have to quit studying and do the rest of this application thing. NNNNOOOOOOOOOooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also...special thanks to storyofmylife for helping me find the damn building. Totally random meeting, but I was soooo lost on that campus :-P I'd just gotten off the phone from calling the testing center to figure out where the hell they were (recorded message: "We're located in the South Building!"...hey thanks! where?!) when Rhiannon walks up out of nowhere. Yeah, nothing like running into somebody for the 1st time in 7 years 30 min before the GRE. My brain was well on the way to fried already...it was fortunate though, seeing as she knew where the South Building was. Whew. And thanks!
All in all I'm pretty happy with the scores I know thus far. (Both are higher than my friend in grad school at OU got...and she managed to get a grant, so maybe my chances aren't so bad.) I don't know about the actual writing section...I can string a sentence together and even punctuate when I choose to, but who knows. It's not going to keep me out of grad school or anything. I'm sending my Psych subject test scores to everybody too, even when it's not required, cuz I'm damn proud of that score. So maybe that'll make up for a bad writing score if it turns out sucky.
Now I have to quit studying and do the rest of this application thing. NNNNOOOOOOOOOooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also...special thanks to storyofmylife for helping me find the damn building. Totally random meeting, but I was soooo lost on that campus :-P I'd just gotten off the phone from calling the testing center to figure out where the hell they were (recorded message: "We're located in the South Building!"...hey thanks! where?!) when Rhiannon walks up out of nowhere. Yeah, nothing like running into somebody for the 1st time in 7 years 30 min before the GRE. My brain was well on the way to fried already...it was fortunate though, seeing as she knew where the South Building was. Whew. And thanks!