anyone receive their score reports in the mail for nov. 3?

anthonyk · Post by **anthonyk** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 7:59 pm

so i haven't received my score yet for the november 3 physics gre. i am just wondering if anyone else has.

jdhooghe · Post by **jdhooghe** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 8:58 pm

I have. Apparently I didn't answer as many as I thought! It says I only answered 73, with 15 of those being wrong >.< . Anyway, hopefully this 65% will get me in somewhere...

drken · Post by **drken** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 9:15 pm

i just received mine yesterday. it said i answered 87 total, which is strange because i only thought i answered 75-80 after finishing the test that day. but i got 83 of those 87 correct! so i was happy about that.

one strange thing: i originally requested my scores to be sent to 4 grad schools using the free option when you register. however, i called in last week to get my scores early and also to order extra score reports, and now on the copy i got in the mail yesterday, it lists the score recipients as the extra schools i just ordered last week, not the 4 schools that i originally requested them sent to...

does this mean that the scores weren't sent to the original 4?? i'm going to call ETS on monday.

jdhooghe · Post by **jdhooghe** » Sat Dec 15, 2007 10:48 pm

Maybe they switched our test!

Anyway, congratulations on the score though. I feel pretty crappy. I spent the summer and the months leading up to the test studying and I thought I did well...

marten · Post by **marten** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 1:26 pm

I finally got mine in the mail last Friday, Dec 14. A bit early, as that was the estimated mailing date, but no complaints here.

I answered 72, and got 14 incorrect. Leaves me at the 68% percentile with a 750. I'm satisfied with that, as I was an engineering major and had been studying since July. My first practice tests were down in the 500-550s, so the studying definitely paid off. I got a 750 on the last official practice test, so I'm glad I didn't do any worse then that.

Marten

vicente · Post by **vicente** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 1:50 pm

drken, when you put in four schools when writing the GRE General, the schools will only receive General scores, unless you took the Subject test before the General test. You will have to rerequest those schools and pay again. ETS is so nice, aren't they?

marten · Post by **marten** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 1:56 pm

drken, do you mean that you requested your 4 scores when you registered for the general GRE, or when you registered for the subject GRE? Perhaps you changed the original four, instead of appending 4 additional ones.

I mailed in a form, (I find forms are much clearer then obscure phone menus), and paid once to send all my scores (general and subject) to all my schools. Of course the "free" score reports from the general test were useless to me as I hadn't taken the subject yet an had to have those sent again, as vicente points out.

Marten

nvanmeter · Post by **nvanmeter** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:27 pm

i finally got my score report today (12/18). damn that took awhile. answered 99, got 4 incorrect, so raw score of 94. anyone know what the cutoff was for a 990?

marten · Post by **marten** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:32 pm

nice score, nvanmeter. The score report should tell you right on the form what the score is. In the subject test score box, it was under "score".

nvanmeter · Post by **nvanmeter** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:35 pm

yeah i know, it's a 990. i meant what was the raw score cutoff? like was i on the border or well above it?

quizivex · Post by **quizivex** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:43 pm

The cutoff varies depending on which version of the test you took... there are several forms of the test given across different time zones and such, each with different cutoffs, and maybe there are different forms within the same time zone, I don't know...

so having a very high raw score probably doesn't help too much since the committees won't know what your "real" percentile is... I had a raw score of <deleted for anonymity>, but my test was in <deleted for anonymity>. Try talking to students who took the test with you. You could probably predict the cutoff based on their raw scores and scaled scores. Nobody else at my school took the Oct test

butsurigakusha · Post by **butsurigakusha** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 6:02 pm

I don't have a publication or any special awards. I should have published by now, I have just slacked on my research. Oh well, I'm not sure I want to go to a top grad school anyway. I like being at the top of my class. That will surely change if I go to a top school.

drken · Post by **drken** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 9:19 pm

@ marten/vicente:

I kept track of which 4 schools I was sending the "free" reports to, and I just put those same 4 down for the general GRE and the subject GRE (I took the general before the subject, so they should have received both). It's a moot point now, because I got my official score report yesterday which showed that they had been sent to those original 4 schools (in addition to the report I got earlier saying that they'd been sent to the extra ones I had just called in for). Anyways, this is all too confusing, but all the schools got all of the scores.

@ quizivex/butsurigakusha:

First author publications don't necessarily mean much... I worked for 2 years solid on a project that was just published, but was 4th out of 4 authors (simply because two profs who didn't do any work wanted to be 2nd and 3rd).

Also, the Goldwater scholarship is a complete joke. It's limited to 4 people from each school, so kids from freaking community colleges end up winning it because X ivy league school/stanford/MIT/etc. can only nominate 4 people. To top that off, a friend of mine with 3 Nobel laureate recs and a perfect GPA at MIT was only an honorable mention. How does that make any sense?

twistor · Post by **twistor** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 11:22 pm

And what precisely is the problem with community colleges?

Academic hegemony leads to the belief that ivy league schools provide superior education, when in fact education cannot be trivialized or commodified in such a way that a particular institution can provide a better education than anywhere else.

Universities provide important networking opportunities and professional research connections not available at small colleges, but do not think this means that Harvard is any better than any place else. This type of thinking is exact what allows schools like Harvard to charge massive amounts of money for tuition.

grae313 · Post by **grae313** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 1:43 am

I don't think drken was dissing community colleges as much as the system that limits each school to four nominations. Let the scholarship be merit/achievment based, regardless of what school you come from.

quizivex · Post by **quizivex** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 1:44 am

First author publications don't necessarily mean much... I worked for 2 years solid on a project that was just published, but was 4th out of 4 authors (simply because two profs who didn't do any work wanted to be 2nd and 3rd).

Yeah, whether or not a student publishes and where his name falls on the christmas list of authors depends much less on the student and more on the prof. Some profs refuse to put any undergrad on a paper while others will put anyone who was in the vicinity of the lab during the experiment on the paper. But again, with lots of high grades and test scores out there, I worry pubs and such things are the brownie points needed to get serious consideration.

Also, the Goldwater scholarship is a complete joke. It's limited to 4 people from each school, so kids from freaking community colleges end up winning it because X ivy league school/stanford/MIT/etc. can only nominate 4 people. To top that off, a friend of mine with 3 Nobel laureate recs and a perfect GPA at MIT was only an honorable mention. How does that make any sense?

Yeah and this award too defeats its own purpose, so it seems. They claim the award intends to "foster and encourage excellence in science and mathematics" and "provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue careers in these fields." But yet if you read profiles of the winners it seems they've all been doing independent research projects since high school. Thus the scholarship is not fostering excellence since the students were already so wonderful to begin with... and they're not providing highly qualified scientists since the winners were already determined on being scientists since puberty at the latest.

To top that off, a friend of mine with 3 Nobel laureate recs and a perfect GPA at MIT was only an honorable mention. How does that make any sense?

They probably didn't like one of his essays... oh wait, the one person who read his app didn't like his essays... oh wait... the one person who skimmed a few sentences of his app found reason not to like him and threw out the whole app...

drken · Post by **drken** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 2:49 am

I certainly meant no offense at all to community colleges; I think that they are an essential part of the educational system in this country. grae313 was correct in that I was only trying to demonstrate that the 4-person limit makes no sense, and that the award should be purely merit-based with no other ridiculous constraints thrown in. Of course, that's rarely the case with any of these things nowadays.

twistor · Post by **twistor** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 4:25 pm

Fair enough.

I thought you were being elitist and saying that only Ivy league students should win.

wkpsobolev · Post by **wkpsobolev** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 10:45 pm

I specifically counted 81 questions answered at the 5 mins left mark, score report says I omitted 26. 100-26=74<81, what is going on??

drken · Post by **drken** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 12:13 am

wkpsobolev, you can always request a re-scoring by hand, but I don't know how that usually works out for people.

twistor, apologies again for any offense I might have caused, I have nothing against community colleges (in fact, I dated a girl for awhile who went to one!).

grae313 · Post by **grae313** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 2:00 am

yeah, I counted 84 and my score report says I only answered 79 or 80. When I saw that I just figured I counted wrong because of the rushing and adrenaline, but now I'm beginning to wonder. Several people have a number significantly different on their score report than they remember answering. Maybe they omitted some of the questions from the scoring??

Mindaugas · Post by **Mindaugas** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 3:26 pm

I answered all the questions during the test and they write that I ommited 0 questions, so it is o.k. for me.

quizivex · Post by **quizivex** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 9:15 pm

They rarely throw out more than one question, the most I've heard of was two.

You can tell how many questions were thrown out by adding up:
#Correct + #Incorrect +#Omitted, and the difference from 100 is the number thrown out.

I remember the same thing happening when I took the SAT... I thought I didn't omit any of the questions but when I got my score report it said I omitted two.

fermiboy · Post by **fermiboy** » Fri Dec 21, 2007 1:02 am

I think that your brain is so fried at the end of the test that it can't even count correctly. I thought I answered 85-90, and I really only answered 80. I just estimated by looking at my sheet though.

grae313 · Post by **grae313** » Fri Dec 21, 2007 2:17 am

I actually counted. 84. But yeah, I was feeling pretty fried.

schandre · Post by **schandre** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 6:24 pm

60 days and I still haven't received my score reports.
International mail sucks sometimes.

quizivex · Post by **quizivex** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 8:36 pm

Wow, I thought ETS tests were enough of an ordeal... I saw your post, schandre, about all the paying and traveling you had to do to take the GRE.

I guess I should be thankful that my school itself was a testing center, and all I had to do was literally wake up out of bed, have a snack, walk 4 blocks to a familiar building, take the test, and then 4 more blocks to the cafeteria for lunch (though I wasn't able to eat since I was so fried from the test), and then back to my room and back to sleep.

I might have struggled more with the test if I had to deal with traveling somewhere strange at 7am and such.

schandre · Post by **schandre** » Thu Jan 10, 2008 3:02 pm

Today I finally received my physics GRE score report. It took thirty days since ETS claims to have mailed it, which is weird since the letter is an "international priority airmail" and it should have taken between 5 to 11 working days to arrive and not the 20 working days days it took.
The report says I answered 77 questions and omitted 23, exactly as I counted on the test day, so I didn't have the same problem some people here had. Also, I got 72 correct and 5 incorrect, which was enough for a 910 score.