Tested
Posted on May 9, 2008
I took the GRE today and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I can’t say too much about it because they make you write out a confidentiality statement and sign it. Basically they don’t want people telling other people the questions. What I do have to say is stuff you can get from the GRE website anyway.
There were two writing sections, which get sent off to be graded. I’m thankful they were on the computer rather than paper, otherwise I would have gotten writer’s cramp. After that was a break followed by a verbal section and a quantitative (math) section. I forget my exact scores, but it looked like I did better on the quantitative section than I did the verbal section. However, I went to the website when I got back home and found out they are different scales. I did score above the average on each section, so I suppose that’s some consolation.
In the first writing section, they present two short statements and you choose one of them to write about. For the second writing section you are presented with a lengthier statement that you have to analyze and write about. If I remember correctly, the latter is allotted 30 minutes and the former is allotted 45 minutes. The GRE website says they aren’t interested in grammar so much as the persuasiveness of the argument, so I think I did okay. There wasn’t enough time to come up with incredibly thorough arguments, but the cases presented seemed to point to some logical conclusions, so I’m guessing that as long as they arguments seem well reasoned, the test taker (me) should do okay.
The whole thing is scheduled for four hours, so it was scheduled to start at 7:00 and go to 11:00. However, since it is computer based you can work at your own pace more or less (each section has it’s own time limit). I thought it went pretty quick. I was actually done a little before 10:00. Now that it’s over it seems a bit anti-climatic, though I should wait for my official scores which should come in the mail in 10 – 15 days.
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