michael_cain's Journal: Taking the GRE

In order to be considered for the graduate program in economics at CU, it is necessary to have current GRE scores. This seems at least inconsistent; the department insists on having transcripts with my undergraduate grades from 27 years ago, but won't take my GRE scores from that same time. Well, the scores may not actually be available. I believe that ETS only keeps scores for 20 years. University grades are apparently kept forever.

Once I decided that I was going through with this and scheduled the exams, I bought a study guide (Cliffs TestPrep). That turned out to be a good thing because there have been some changes in the GRE in 27 years. Two were particularly important:

• The tests are administered on a computer rather than paper (unless you really insist on the paper, or are outside North America). You have to answer questions in the order presented, you have to answer the current question before you can go on to the next one, and you can't go back and look at a question after you've gone on. I'm very glad I knew this in advance, since it shoots down my usual time-management techniques for allocating more time to the harder questions.
• There's a writing section! That's new since I took the exams many years ago, and it was good to have a chance to think about how to approach the two different essays you need to write.

Cheating must have increased in the past quarter-century, since they seem to be much more paranoid about it now. They took my pen away from me and made me use their pencils for scratch work. They provided the scratch paper, which was collected and shredded at the end of the period. Each test station was monitored by video camera. Open windows are not allowed in the test room. That led to one of several fairly irritating items.

The air conditioner necessary for cooling the small test room was quite noisy. They provided earplugs (uncomfortable badly-fitting ones) to control the noise from the keyboards and the air conditioner. The computer monitors were such that there was a serious glare problem from the overhead lights. Overall, it was a considerably less pleasant process than what I remember.

The good news about testing on the computer is that you get some scores immediately. I scored 800 on the quantitative, which indicates that I was careful and paid attention -- there's nothing in there that's hard. I did find myself admiring the way they structured some of the questions, giving you lots of opportunities to answer the wrong question (eg, setting up a problem that requires division and asking for the remainder, but listing the correct quotient among the answers).

I scored 630 on the verbal sections. I seem to recall doing somewhat better than that the first time around. I suspect that raising two children and 25 years in industry where "write it simpler so the executives understand" is standard has done some damage to my working vocabulary and handling of subtle analogies.

The essays have to be scored by hand and I won't know how I did on those for a while. I think I did fine.