Prepoceros

Just now the barista at the Starbucks around the corner complimented me on my new haircut—I’m not addicted, I swear. Actually, I estimate that I spend about as much per month on frappuccinos as I do on electricity—one benefit(?) of being the office coffee gopher.

Ok, so GRE. I’m still bitter, but there’s not much I can do about it. If it’s not fair, it’s not fair. The test today went slightly better than I expected. The math was actually harder than our version of the math, which I was glad to see, and the verbal was at about the same level. The place I *really* lucked out was on the essays. Topic 1 on the first prompt (for which you have to state and defend a point of view on an issue) was so perfect that it brought tears to my eyes. I barely read Topic 2…I don’t even remember now what that one was about. I am of course not allowed to disseminate information about either topic on the internet, but I will say that if I’d been allowed to make up my own essay prompt, Topic 1 would have been it.

My scores were Q800 V770 (they didn’t give percentiles). Not perfect, but higher than I’ve scored before, so I can live with it. I felt comfortable with the essays and am fairly confident I got a 6 on both, but I’ll have to wait and see what the readers say. I’ll still probably take it again when they come out with the new one. I’ve never met a standardized test I couldn’t beat, and I rather not let the GRE be my first “failure.”

Oh, and funny story about the vocab. The one question I know I missed? Jejune, again. I was closer to the right definition than I was on the practice test, but not close enough. The third definition of jejune (per Merriam-Webster) is ‘juvenile’ or ‘puerile’—I knew that one. The *second* definition, however, is ‘dull’ or ‘uninteresting.’ Guess which one appeared on the test. Guess who eliminated jejune in favor of tendentious, even though she didn’t know what the latter meant, because ‘puerile’ didn’t fit in the blank. Yup.

All in all…resentful but resigned. The scoring is stupid, but it’s stupid for everyone. I won’t whine about this any more, I promise; I know that my score is very good and that I’m lucky to have gotten it. Woo woo.

Tags: miscellany

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 5:14 pm and is filed under miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.