Bleeding Fiction

Today is the second time I've taken the GREs. The first was early in my senior year in college, back in 1999. I've come a long way in the six years since. A long way down.

You don't need to know my exact scores. It's enough for you to know that I dropped 30 points in the Verbal section and 80 points in the Quantitative section. They've changed the way the Analytical section works entirely, replacing the multiple choice with an essay question, so I've no idea how new stacks up to old. Essays take a little while to mark, after all. I guarantee it's worse, though.

Losing points from my Quant. score doesn't surprise me; I haven't taken a single math class in six years. Of course, I hadn't taken a single math class for five years before I took the last time, so... I'm not so bothered by my expectedly poorer Analytical grade, either. I did well last time. Really, really well. So losing a few points isn't that big a deal.

But verbal? I was disappointed with my verbal score last time around. To lose 30 points from that really turns my stomach. I'm half-tempted to go take the test again next month, when it'll be long after I've sent off my Evans School application, just to see if I can do better.

None of this aggrivation, by the way, is to say I did poorly. I'm probably in a high percentile bracket for Verbal and Analytical. Quantitative... eh, not so much. But, then, I never expected to be. I'm bad at math. But it just pisses me off; I feel like I've gotten stupider in the past six years, rather than smarter.