GRE

[fox]

who thinks i should retake the GRE?

i took it in december of 1999, so the scores should still be valid:

V 650, 92nd percentile
Q 720, 80th percentile
A 690, 84th percentile

that's not how they're scoring anymore, but still. thing is, i don't like those percentiles with eights in them. anyone have thoughts?

Comments

All depends on the department

[wholenother.livejournal.com]

Some departments still actually take GREs seriously. Not that those are bad scores -- they're not, so stop it! -- but I did better than that (in percentiles, I don't remember the scores, but the fact that I can remember my lowest percentile but can't remember people's names says something scary about me -- an 8 disturbed me, too), and I firmly believe you are brighter than me and, therefore, in a perfect world would do better than me.... (Or, well, however I should put it. Basically, you'd do better the second time around, I believe, but it's all really an expensive crapshoot.) No department is going to take the GREs so seriously as to reject you on those perfectly good scores.

So, unless they're making financial decisions based on GREs, I wouldn't bother. But I understand -- however much we go on and on about how "objectivity" is crap and these things don't measure what they're purporting to measure (and couldn't even if they were well designed, whatever that means), we still want to see that 90 (or, preferably, 99, who am I kidding?) percent of the population are (even just supposedly) behind us.... (Don't forget, too, that the crowd who took the GREs is quite a bit different from the crowd who took the SATs.)

So, don't fret, and don't waste your money if it's not likely to lead to your getting more money in the future.

signed,
wholenother, the parenthetical (some of which, I admit, were added in the editing phase because I'm so tired I actually find myself amusing, which borders on disturbing or maybe disturbed)