The GMAT is Ov-ah!!!

What a relief.  I went and took the GMAT today* – it lasted almost four hours, but at least I’m done.  It was kind of bizarre – before I could test, I had to show ID, get my picture taken, and have my fingerprint scanned by this biometric thingy.  Then every time I left or re-entered the testing room, I had to do the fingerprint scan, and there were video feeds of me from two different angles going to the test administrator’s room to make sure there was no cheating.  I couldn’t even take in scratch paper, much less a calculator – they gave me a dry-erase pad to use for any figuring or scribbles I had to do.  Definitely a new experience in testing…

Anyway, the math section was a butt-kicker.  See, it’s a computer-adjusted exam, so what happens is they start you with a moderate question, and if you get that right, your next question is a hard one.  Get that right, and you just keep getting hard ones til you get one wrong, at which point you switch to moderate.  If you get the moderate ones right, you go back to hard; if you get them wrong, you drop to easy questions.  It’s weird.  But your score is weighted based on the difficulty of the questions you answered… I must have gotten a lot right, because I kept getting heinous math questions.  For instance – one of them that I remembered took my husband, who has a masters in math, like 10 minutes to do, and on the exam you only get about 2 minutes per question.  And did I mention NO calculator?  I kind of thought in a way that it was a bit unfair if you got hard questions, because you had the same amount of time to answer as you would an easy question, but they took longer, so if you ran out of time you’d get penalized for not finishing, whereas the person who kept messing up and got easy questions might have time to finish…  Except maybe easy/moderate questions would take them as long as hard for other people…  Whatever.  Waaah.  I didn’t run out of time (mostly because on some that would take forever I just did best-guess), so I guess it doesn’t really matter. 

Good news is, I needed a 450 to be considered for grad school (not sure of the grading range on the GMAT – top score is maybe 800, I think?), and I got a 710 (unofficial score – will get official score mailed to me in a couple weeks).  So yay.  Cake, right?  At least it’s over…  (and it’s especially nice to have it out of the way before Creation).

Speaking of which – for the first time ever, I get to be in a popup at Creation (with my TBear) instead of a tent!  Sweet!  And it has queen-size beds and all sorts of cool stuff.

*Actually wrote this yesterday (Wednesday) and couldn’t post because Xanga was down.  Dreadful shock.