I meant to write about this earlier but as soon as I was done, I wanted to purge the event from my mind. Last Friday I took the GRE and, before I start whining, want to state that I did just fine. My verbal scores were lower than I expected but my math was great. This is not how I felt when I was taking the test, though.
The GRE is administered on computers and it is an adaptive test. Based on the accuracy of your previous answers, the computer tries to give you a question that it thinks is the most difficult question you can answer. Over a series of thirty or so questions, it narrows in on the test-takers skill level for that section of the test. The theory sounds great and I'm sure the ETS people (the private company that creates the GRE) have done studies to show that a normal paper-based version and the computer-based version correlate well. There were a few difficulties that I encountered when taking my test, though.
For starters, though the theory may be sound, the psychological effect on the test-taker is painful. I spent the vast majority of the math test feeling I was failing the test. The questions were obtuse, hard for me to reason through well, and plain old difficult for me to answer with confidence. After seeing my score, I think the computer very quickly narrowed in on my math ability and continued to present me question after question that was just beyond the reach of what I was able to do. It left me feeling stupid and discouraged even though I was doing great.
Secondly, because the computer needs a previous answer to figure out what question to ask next, you can't skip any questions. Each section has a fixed number of questions to answer and even though questions may be getting harder and harder, a question left un-answered is wrong. All of this makes pacing yourself through the test fairly difficult. How do you decide when to take an educated guess and how do you decide to keep working on the question? This is particularly relevant in the verbal section where a passage-based question may show up near the end of the test. If you have five questions and five minutes left, you better help that the last question isn't based on a passage that will take two minutes to read before you can answer the question. I finished one of my verbal sections eight minutes early (somewhere between 1/4th and 1/5th early) because I didn't know if I would have enough time for a verbal question at the end. The inability to skip questions and come back to the hard ones is frustrating.
If, for some reason, I do have to take retake the test, I plan on trying to be more strategic about my use of time. This is a different type of test all-together.
