#also i really like test stats and scoring methods and %iles if u couldnt tell from this drivel lol i just think its super interesting

[tchaikovskaya]

world’s most annoying petulant whining about stuff i know im wrong for not being more than satisfied with under the cut bc im the woooorst :)))

ok so i took the gre today and i did SUPER well, i took it last year w/o studying and got 160 V/ 163 Q, which happens to be like ~83th %ile for both of them. definitely not bad and served my purposes (i knew i only needed a 300 to get into my undergrad university’s masters program so i didnt bother with buckling down and studying lol) but i know/knew i could do better if i actually prepared for it. so this time i did, and every practice test ive taken has been like mid-low 160s for the verbal and almost never below 167 for the quant. i know theyre not a very faithful measure for the real test because the real thing has the difficulty adaptive scoring algorithm so i didnt reaaaally know what to expect. 

so test day arrives! i did well on both verbal sections, i wasnt agonizing over any of the questions tbh, it went fine. i had 3 quant sections which means one of them was experimental and didnt factor into my score, im almost certain it was the last section bc its difficulty level was generally normal after having a normal one first and a harder (adapted) one second. i am about 99.99% positive that i got every single question in the first quant section correct. i even finished with like 10 minutes left and went back and completely redid the handful of problems i thought were relatively difficult and confirmed my answer. and because of the adaptive difficulty method, since i did so well on the first section, the second section’s questions were ALL at least moderately hard. the jump in difficulty was honestly insane and it really flustered me lmfao.

so i basically ran out of time with 2 questions left, i had 30 seconds left when i finished the 18th of 20 questions. one of them was a question where you had to type in your answer, so i couldnt just pick a random answer choice and have a 1/5 chance of it being right. then i had 10 seconds left and i looked at the last question and it was a “select all choices that apply” question with a full paragraph of text so i was just like lol nope and clicked the answer in the middle thinking here goes nothing. and the section timer ran out and auto-closed the test section literally 1 second after that. so im guaranteed to have gotten at least one wrong, almost certainly at least 2, and most likely 3+ bc the preceding 18 questions were so difficult and time consuming to solve.

so... the tests ends and my scores pop up on the screen and.....

i got a 166.....?

the gre quantitative section’s grading curve is generally much less forgiving than the verbal section’s (i guess a disproportionate number of STEM people take the general gre test? idk) so missing 2 questions means your score drops by 2 or more points (usually more than 2 lol), and i’ll never know for sure thanks to how the adaptive scoring thing that i already mentioned works, but if i’d had time to actually attempt the last two questions and gotten them both right i most likely would have gotten a perfect 170 so lmfao fuck me :)))))

i know that sounds so annoying like boo fucking hoo i scored in the 92nd %ile instead of the 99th :((( woe is me! but its just frustrating knowing that i COULD have, yknow? i feel like if i had finished all the questions and felt good about it and gotten a 166 i’d be over the moon with that

honestly idk what scores i was hoping to get but i really just wanted to break 330, which i accomplished, and i was terrified that my scores would either stay the same or drop the 2nd time so deep down i know im definitely happy with it but :/ ugh

#(its about standardized testing spoiler alert) #bc theres nothing i love more than a means of quantifying my talents goals and abilities lmfao #also i really like test stats and scoring methods and %iles if u couldnt tell from this drivel lol i just think its super interesting #(i probably bombed the writing section tbh but ive heard from multiple people that nobody cares about it) #(like i ran out of time litchrally in the middle of typing a sentence lmfaooooooo)