Has anyone taken the GRE?

[Lady Grace of Pemberley]

Lady Grace, That is great news! Congratulations! Keep us updated! I am also planning to apply to a graduate program, but not until next year (too late to apply for this year). I will also be taking the GRE and therefore am glad to see any information and advice about it. There is limited information about graduate programs and exams on this forum, so please post your experiences and advice!

My experience with the GRE was all rather rushed, as was the rest of my whole grad school application process (I am still in the process of applying and classes start August 26th.... so.... yeah ). I found out that I needed to take the GRE on a Tuesday night and immediately went online and registered to take the $185.00 exam that upcoming Friday afternoon. Between work and other obligations, I probably only studied for a couple of hours at the most. My main resource was the "math review" document you will be able to access if you download the POWERPREP II software from the GRE website. Additionally, I watched a few videos from Khan Academy (emphasis on a few) and used a free practice test offered by Peterson's: GRE | GRE Test Preparation I would highly recommend those practice tests - the one I took was pretty similar to the real exam. I think I scored somewere around 303 (combined score) on the practice test, and on the real thing, I got a 161 on the verbal section, a 152 on the quantitative reasoning section, and a 5.0 on the analytical writing section. I know, I know - not the best score ever, but for only studying for a few hours, I'm just glad that I got a high enough score to get into the university I was shooting for.

The test itself was loooong - much longer than the typical CLEP. You do get a couple one minute breaks and one 10-12 minute break, which was nice, but just be sure to pace yourself. For the last section (which was, unfortunately, a math section), I was pretty much ready to hit "b" on every question and be done.

The analytical writing section was first. It consisted of two essays - one where you had to argue your position on a topic (the "analyze an issue" essay). My topic was pulled directly from this topic pool: GRE Revised General Test: Analyze an Issue For the second essay (the "analyze an argument" essay), I had to do just that - analyze the logical components of an argument. Again, my essay topic can be found in the topic pool provided on the GRE website: GRE Revised General Test: Analyze an Argument I really didn't study for this section at all, excepting the two essays I wrote while taking the practice test, but the prompts were pretty easy and I felt comfortable with my finished essays.

The verbal section was quite simple; it was pretty much just like the multiple-choice section for the College Composition CLEP. Again, I didn't study for this section except for the practice test. I'm a complete bibliophile and a regular user of ostentatious words, but a couple of the words on that test were pretty serious.... There were two verbal sections on the exam.

As far as the three quantitative sections went... well, I don't really have a whole lot to say. Let me just put it this way - I apparently could have used a bit more studying in this area. :confused: Yep, I was pretty rusty on my math skills going into this. Oh well...

I got my scores back for the verbal and quantitative sections immediately, but I had to wait a couple days to get my scores for the essays. The whole process was a lot faster than the College Composition CLEP's scoring system, though!

That's all I can think of for now - I hope it helped out somehow. Let me know if you have any questions!