Well, that was pretty much the exact opposite of kittens and rainbows. Ow.

I left a distressingly large amount of questions blank. Most of them had to do with the seventeenth century and/or Biblical references, of which there seemed to be AN INORDINATE AMOUNT. (I know everyone says that about periods they aren't good with, but I don't think I'm wrong here.)

I did the whole practice subject GRE in English the other night. The good news is that I got more questions right than wrong, and, assuming I performed all the incantations and rituals necessary to convert the scores from raw to the 200-800 scale, it looks like on that particular version of the test, I made somewhere between a 650 and a 700.

There are four areas I'm going to fail miserably at on any version. My biblical knowledge is very, very poor. My ability to understand reference to classical Greek and Roman literature is not much better. And I completely bypassed the Jacobean through Restoration periods in my coursework, with the grudging exceptions of Paradise Lost and some Herbert. I'm hopeless with literary critics. (Also, for some reason, on the four questions that featured one, the other, or both of them, I consistently mixed up T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. I obviously need to look up both of them. Didn't one of them write the book Cats is based on...?)

But hey, for most of the Romantics, the Victorians, the Modernists, the Postmodernists, and anyone after them, I'm golden. I'm pretty good with the medievals, thanks to Anglo-Saxon and a bit of spare-time Chaucer reading, and as long as they avoid references to Rome, I can do the eighteenth century folks. I'm not half bad at Shakespeare, either, courtesy of the Twenty-Pound Red Book of All Shakespeare from Exeter, and I can take a better-than-average stab at his contemporaries.

...I'm so jinxed myself into getting the hardest test ever next month. Crap.

*shrug* Less annoying than I thought it would be. Over quicker, too. And you get your scores right away, at least for the verbal and math sections, which is nice. (670/600, respectively, which...is okay? I have no idea what the average is. The combined score is well over the minimum for UT's info. science program, which is all that matters to me.)

Now I'm bored. Maybe I should go read something. *wanders off*

The GRE site seems to be an impenetrable fortress of confusion, so I turn to the general public. For those of you who've taken the computer test, can you skip around in each section, or do you have to go straight through, no changing your answers?

(Please tell me ETS has had a moment of sanity and not made it the latter. Please.)

ETA: Answered. ETS is run by morons.

I have been a crap commenter this week. This doesn't mean I'm not reading my flist (believe me, I am), but rather that for no apparent reason, I'm just down on communication this week.

But anyway, here's a blanket sympathy/congratulations/good luck post, because I've seen needs for all of those at some point this week.

*

So, who has math GRE tips for me? My test date is Sept. 6th. Fun, fun. I'm looking at the practice test for the math portion, and OH MY GOD. I haven't had a math class in more than four years. I tried to put everything math-related out of my mind after high school. I CAN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING. They have little review bits at the top, yeah, but ow. And my TI-83 has been dead for a couple years now. Do I even need a graphing calculator?

Not that the School of Information Science really cares about an applicant's math score, but I'd like it not to drag my total score down to unreasonable levels, y'know?