GRE

I first took the GRE in 2010 so that I could compete for some Army nominative program. Since the Army doesn't accept scores older than five years, I took it again today.

GRE scoring has changed in the intervening years, making the math sections harder. While I did sufficiently well for my purposes (I don't intend to pursue any science degrees anytime soon) I suppose I could have done better if I'd studied more. Math has its own syntax, and some of the questions were so difficult to understand that I spent several precious minutes just trying to figure out what they were asking. 35 minutes to do 20 questions seemed too short.

Still, my 163 in the quantitative reasoning ranks in the 86th percentile -- a comparative improvement over my score last time. I improved even more in the reading section, where my score of 167 put me in the 97th percentile. Last time, it was a 620 -- under the old system that wasn't so impressive.

I'll have to wait until the official scores come out to know how I did on the writing section. Last time I got a 4.0, which was far below what I'd hoped for, given that's the minimum for most programs. I had thought that by blogging a lot I would have no problem, but in reality it's more important to know how that section is graded.