Testing My Patience

In the process of applying for grad school, I of course had to take the GRE. I have been dragging my feet to take this for several years now. 2 things were worrying me about the test:

1. Writing section. While I always do well on research papers for classes, I have never tested well on writing standardized tests. In prepping for the test, I realized the reason I don't do well is that there is usually no choice of question, you have to write about the topic they give you. I don't do well because I get offended at having to answer such a dumb topic. Fortunately, it turns out no one seems to care about this section, as least as far as applying to grad school goes, so I decided to not worry about it.

2. Computer based. The test is computer based and assigns you questions based on correct or wrong answers to previous questions through some fancy statistical algorithm something or other that seems pretty complicated. Basically, if the computer decides you're stupid, it treats you as such and you can't score well. I had made peace with this fact by test time and was prepared for whatever the computer threw at me.

I did a little better on the test than I hoped to and was pretty pleased with myself. UNTIL a week after getting my scores I receive another letter from the GRE people saying they think there was something wrong with the computer algorithm on my verbal section and had it been working properly, I may have scored higher. WHAT! That's exactly what I was worried would happen!! The verbal section is what I did the best on and now they think I should have scored even higher?! Couldn't I just retake the math instead? They are nice enough to allow me to take the verbal section again for free but upon looking into it, no matter what I score the second time, even if it is lower, that is my new score. I have six months to decide but for now I think I'm just going to keep my current scores and think smugly to myself that I am in fact smarter than a computer.

P.S. Anyone taken the GRE lately? There are no less than 8 screen pages telling you how to operate a mouse (the cord points away from you!) and 5 screen pages teaching you how to use a scroll bar.