Wrong, but in a good way.
Today I took the GRE. I've been preparing for it halfheartedly over the last couple weeks, which means I bought a book and have been taking some practice tests. In the practice tests I have consistently scored 780-800 on math and 680-720 on verbal.

Today was the big day, so I drove down to Glastonbury to the testing center. These tests are computer-adaptive tests, which means they make the questions harder as you do better, etc. Also, this means you work at your own pace, on a computer, and no one else is there to bother you, which is a big improvement over the SAT imo.

When I arrived at the testing site, I took my blood sugar, which was inexplicably around 200. I didn't *feel* stressed out, but sometimes stress causes my sugar to rise. Anyway, this is bad, because I know from past experience that having high blood sugar causes my mind to work worse. Anyway, I took a shot and shrugged my shoulders and went in.

The first half of the test are essays. I felt "ok" about my essays; I actually sorta ran out of time on the first one, which usually means I wrote too much. The second one was better, I thought, but neither were my best work.

After a ten-minute break, I started the multiple choice sections. The verbal consists of four types of questions: antonyms, analogies, sentence completions, and reading comprehension.

In my practice exams, sentence completions were a breeze, analogies were easy as well unless (as occasionally happened) I didn't know the word at all. The other two categories would give me trouble, however. Analogies especially are maddening because the relationships between the words aren't always clear and I often feel like two or more answers are right.

In any event, the first verbal section felt like a disaster. There were TWO antonyms (out of 8) that I didn't know at all, the analogies were meh, the reading comprehension wasn't very difficult, but even the sentence completions felt tricky, and there were a couple sentence completions where I felt like two answers could be right.

Next was the math section, which was middling easy. There were a couple of problems that I wasn't sure how to solve analytically, but I wound up just plugging in numbers and figuring it out. After that was another verbal section. One of the verbal sections was therefore an experimental section (where they give new questions to establish a baseline for future testtakers). This verbal section wasn't quite as much of a disaster, but I didn't think it had gone well, either.

At the end of the test, they give you the option of cancelling your scores. I wasn't really feeling that good about the exam; the essays were bleh, the verbals were both yucky, and I just felt ok about the math. Then I thought to myself, "Self! If you cancel your scores you have to take the test again!" Finally I just decided to report the scores and see what happened. I mean, if it was really bad I could just take it again.

I got 800 on math and 770 on verbal. Nice read. (obviously the essays aren't graded in real time).