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Irregularities in the General GRE

Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 8:49 pm
by swepi
Since the topic of the General GRE has come up, I would like to share my experience with ETS in the hope of getting some information from those of you who have taken the General GRE recently. I recently took the GRE again, didn't finish the Quantitative section and got a score of 640. I thought this was odd since I got a 720 the first time and scored above 750 on the practice tests provided by ETS. Of the 28 questions on the test, I answered 21 of which 14 where of difficulty "5", 7 of difficulty "4" and 1 was of difficulty "3". I didn't have any time issues with the test before and ETS simply tells me that I should have "employed better time management".

Either way, if any of you have any time, or the inclination, I was hoping you could go through the GRE Diagnostic Service at: http://grediagnostic.ets.org
to look at the distribution of difficulty in the questions you got, to see if my situation is peculiar in any way.

ETS doesn't seem to care about my concern and I am hoping to get more information from others who have taken the test, to see if my concern is valid. Most of the responses I get from ETS are copied verbatim from their website, which makes me a bit suspicious. Otherwise, good luck to you all on your applications.

Re: Irregularities in the General GRE

Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 8:56 pm
by cato88
I dont see how you could possibly win.

Re: Irregularities in the General GRE

Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 8:58 pm
by abeboparebop
That website is pretty wild. I wonder if it can be used to access results before score reports have been mailed... although I guess the score isn't actually directly available there.

Anyway:

Code: Select all

Difficult    # of questions
5            17
4            8
3            2
2            1
1            0
I got an 800. Interestingly enough, though they say the early questions matter the most, I only got two questions wrong and one was the 2nd problem on the test -- doesn't seem to have affected my score.

Re: Irregularities in the General GRE

Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 9:00 pm
by abeboparebop
Also interesting: I only missed one question in the verbal section, of difficulty 4, and I got a 780. Weird scoring.

Re: Irregularities in the General GRE

Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 9:42 pm
by swepi
@cato88: I can't win and even if I could it would probably be a Pyrrhic victory. I can, however, try to gather some information to get a better understanding of what is going on, since most everyone in this forum has taken the test at some point.

@abeboparebop: Thanks for taking the time to look that up.

Re: Irregularities in the General GRE

Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2008 2:47 am
by trani
Difficulty- # of problems
1 4
2 5
3 6
4 9
5 4

I got 3 wrong but all around the middle of the test.

@abeboparebop
seeing at our distributions getting the second problem might have cause you to have so many difficulty 5 problems in order to redeem yourself...

A curiosity:
One of the questions I got wrong was difficulty 1 and apparently I spent 5 minutes and 8 sec on it!!! I actually do remember freaking out about it but got a hold of myself. Next I solved the following 3 problems in under 30 secs each (according to the report) to catch up with the time. Moral of the story if you catch yourself freaking out take a deep breath, curse the he11 out of ETS for putting you through this and keep going. You still have a chance :D

Re: Irregularities in the General GRE

Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2008 4:49 pm
by robertson
Difficulty / nÂș problems
5 / 16
4 / 11
3 / 0
2 / 1
1 / 0


I don't know if this helps. The first question was level 2, and then it continues with 4 and 5 all the way. I got all of them right. This is a really weird way to do it, it seems like I took a completely different test. Like other said, I don't think you'll go too far with your reclamation, but not because you're wrong because mainly you'll be fine and you'll get in a nice university, and you'll forget about all this ***.