Confusion Reigns

My GRE-taking experience today was bizarre and at times surreal. There were moments in which I felt I might actually be hallucinating.

Let me backtrack.

Despite imagining all manner of various obstacles and disasters, it had not occurred to me that I would get basically no sleep the night before. This is stupid because I get insomnia very easily from any kind of marginally unusual experience or expectation; in the last month I have had under-slept nights from such goofy things as getting an email from an old friend, thinking about the ancient Mayan culture, and having a (hopefully) fictional character (ostensibly) of my own devising acting up in my head. Somehow, though, I was not prepared for last night's sleeplessness. I did get about an hour of sleep between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. (during which I had a dream about Robert and me taking a long boat to a Wisconsian colony in Africa, where Robert had obtained a high-paying job from I believe a listing in The Economist). Otherwise, not much going.

Fortunately, my exam was at 8:00 and adrenalin got me through it. I basically rocked the two essay sections. I was feeling good physically, alert and not nervous, and if I did not get a 5.5 or 6 on this section, it will be because the graders are idiots. Seriously, I am that confident. My favorite moment of the Issue Essay was being inspired by some episodes of the British TV show Yes, Minister to invoke and criticize the idea of "open government." My argument essay - heh, the argument allowed me to find fault with someone's medical research and economic/business arguments. This is good stuff.

The verbal section felt qualitatively different from the practice tests I had been taking. It was both harder and easier - like the vocabulary was less esoteric but the relationships between words was subtler - but it went pretty painlessly. My recently developed Reading Comprehension strategy seemed to pay off, but it's sometimes hard to judge how well you are doing with the verbal section; I couldn't definitively tell whether I was answering smarter or just getting easier questions or flat giving the wrong answers without knowing it. Oddly, my favorite RC passage required me to understand the convoluted relationships among about half a dozen different indicators in a physical sciences setting.

The quantitative....well. I am disappointed in both the ETS and Kaplan materials because they did not prepare me for a certain type of question that appeared no less than three times on my exam. It was a terrible kind of question - the kind that you don't know how to do, even though there is probably an easy formula or standard approach you aren't familiar with, but you know that you could figure out, if only you had the time, but you don't actually have the time, so you waste a bunch of time and then sort of end up guessing anyway. And the first of these three terrors was question #2. Ack. I felt okay about the other questions, but I ran out of time and only finished 25 of the 28 questions in the section.

At this point I was hoping that this quantitative section was the experimental section (and I was buoyed in this hope by the recognition of the unexpected questions) and that I was going to get another shot at the real thing. But a confusing thing happened. I got a section that was, I believe, labeled a "research" section that had all new verbal question types. Once I got started, I almost immediately became confused about what the hell I was doing because nothing in my prep materials had prepared me for this possibility. Does this section count? Am I going to get an experimental section after this? Did that say "research" or did I just imagine it? The help screen gave me nothing. Fortunately, the questions seemed easier than the verbal section I had already completed so I got through it, but man, I was really starting to lose it (my sanity, my ability to focus and take in any kind of information) by the end. When I got to the screen with the "Press Whatever to Proceed to the Next Section" label, I felt roughly like I had by hit in the back of the head with a club as a sleep-deprivation headache came on full strength.

And my foggy-headedness only got worse when the next "section" was the question, do you want to report or cancel your scores? Report. Are you sure? Yes. And then it showed me some scores. I looked at these numbers as though from a great distance and without much comprehension. It gave me the option to move on to the next screen. I moved on. And then realized, fuck, what did those numbers say? I tried to go back, but as in so many aspects of life, there is no going back.

So what am I saying? I am making excuses about why I was such a dingbat that I am not confident that I either perceived the scores correctly originally or remembered them scant moments later. This is a new level of idiocy. I would not quite believe this in a book, yet I experienced it myself.

I somehow stumbled through picking four universities to send my scores to, a task made all the more challenging because I couldn't really remember their names very well at this point and because you had to look them up by the state they are located in.

Then I was done. I went to the bathroom and thought I might throw up from the pain in my head and in my abdomen. I called Robert to pick me up and poured myself some water into a little paper cup. As I raised the cup to my mouth, my hand was shaking like crazy. I drank about 8 little cups of water in quick succession. I vaguely noticed that I was not the weirdest-seeming person in the room despite my whole body vibrating oddly. (A guy was pacing and talking to himself in a semi-berating manner.) I was glad that we live only 10 minutes away from the test center and that I didn't have to try to drive myself home.

I have felt basically horrible physically all afternoon and evening. I desperately wanted to take a nap, but couldn't stop myself from conjuring up various, contradictory images of that damn score report page. I watched an episode of Rome and found myself on the verge of tears from the loss of two good men. So basically, I've been pretty much mentally and physically fucked up in general.

I feel fairly sure that I got a 750 Q. This stands out pretty clearly in my mind and was something I sort of noticed at the time, thinking yeah, screwing up that second question and others like it, not finishing the last few questions, but doing pretty well on the rest - this seems about right. But I didn't have a good sense of my verbal score and have a sort of ambiguous feeling about what I saw or imagined that I saw. I will await the score reports to be sure, which is two to three weeks from now. Jesus. I was supposed to have closure on this damn test by now!

So, the saga continues. Stay tuned.