I have just returned home from taking the GRE and I am in a fine mood. There were no surprises, on the test or on my score. Although I did discover an interesting little tidbit of GRE trivia: Did you know that if you score low enough on the Quantitative section that ETS starts a running laugh track in your headphones as they post it?

No. Not really. But they really should.

And even if it were true, I couldn’t tell you anyway, because they make you promise not to share any of the questions with anyone in any format. So I shouldn’t share with you these wonderful problems with which I worked while taking the test today:

Problem 1.)

Choose A. if column A is greater;  Choose B. if column B is greater; Choose C. if the two equations are equal; Choose D. if more information is needed; Choose E. if you could care less.                    

d=difficulty level of questions   a=accuracy

Column A.                                                                           Column B.

5d(Julia’s Quantitative score) + –a = 1/2                               2

average test score of a                        

Rhesus monkey on a bad day

Problem 2.) Solve this equation:

2x + y(Julia’s Quantitative score) + -3/5(probability of Julia becoming an astrophysicist) = ≤_______∞ when y=a circle with r12.

Okay, since I can see you’re clearly not a Math person, I’ll give you a hint on that second one: for any equation which involves the probability of Julia becoming an astrophysicist, the answer is always zero. I can’t believe you allowed yourself to be tricked by that one! It was so obvious!

Garrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! For those of you out there looking at my sample problems and thinking “That’s just gibberish”, welcome to the Wonderful World of Quantitative GRE Problems with your hostess, Julia Tagliere. That whole section was a foreign language to me. Actually, since I have a background teaching foreign languages, I can’t say that, because those come rather easily to me. I guess I have to come up with an expression that would fit better with my abilities. Let’s see…That whole section was like…Math to me!Yes, I think that’ll do nicely.

Actually, in all honesty, the test-taking itself was not as bad as I had feared. I only asked for one thing in my pre-test prayer, and that was “Please, God, don’t let me run out of the test crying halfway through because I can’t take it anymore.” There–you see? Total proof that God listens.

I felt pretty good the whole time I was taking the test, though I have to admit, as I approached the midpoint–ack! No more geometry terms!–the halfway mark of the test, I noticed that the questions were getting easier, which concerned me a little bit. It wasn’t that I feared I was making mistakes (heck, that was a given, after all); it was that in my GRE for Dummies book, it said that the test calibrates itself according to how you do on the first ten questions. If you do well on the first ten, you get harder questions later; if you do poorly on the first ten, the questions are adjusted to make them easier. So when I saw that Question 14 read “Robert has 5 eggs; Marcus has 4. x= 5 + 4.  Solve for x” I knew I was in trouble. Sure, the questions were getting easier, but I also knew that easier questions weren’t going to increase my score any. (That much Math I could figure out on my own; I’m not a total imbecile.)

S0–I came, I tested, I threw up. I’ve submitted my scores to just one university (there’s no way that my Quantitative scores would ever improve, no matter how often I would take the test, so I’m not bothering). That didn’t make the computer very happy; it obviously thought I shouldn’t place all my eggs in one basket. But by that point in the day, I didn’t think I could do enough Math to divide the eggs equally into any additional baskets anyway.

Hope the U will ignore my Quantitative scores; after all, I’m not looking to become an astrophysicist, right? And astronauts everywhere are eternally grateful for that…