GRE Update

Holy crap! I finally got my official GRE scores back with the official percentile rankings that will go out to grad schools. Not only does the new score report give me the Analytical Writing scores I didn't get immediately after the test, but there are other differences as well. Allow me to elaborate:

Verbal—640 out of 800 and the 90^th percentile
This is the same score, but apparently the real percentile is a one percent drop from the original estimate. In hindsight, I probably could have scored a bit higher if I had studied word lists and such that are published instead of figuring I was good enough at vocabulary and confining my study strictly to practice tests.

Quantitative—730 out of 800 and the 75^th percentile
This score is actually a ten point increase from the score that was reported to me upon test completion. I won't complain about that. However, even with the ten point raise in score, my percentile ranking dropped three percent from the original estimate. Well fooey on them. It would have been nice to hit the 80^th percentile, but I'll live. Yet I can't help but wish I had taken the GRE immediately after graduating. I probably would have done about the same on the Verbal and Analytical Writing sections, but had I remembered all my calculus and had been as proficient at math as I was as a sophomore, I'll bet I could have hit 800 (perfect score) on this section. Considering how much I felt like "I used to know how to do this in calculus and now I don't have enough time/recollection to do it otherwise, I'll just take an educated guess," and I still got 730, 800 isn't really much of a stretch.

Analytical Writing—6.0 out of 6.0 and 96^th percentile
Woo! Can't get any better than a perfect score. I'm surprised. I was expecting more in the area of 5.0 or 5.5 on the section. I knew I did well, but I didn't know I did that well. I guess the 96^th percentile means that about 4 percent of testees get perfect scores, which seems a little high, but oh well.

Overall, I did well enough that I sincerely doubt I'll be taking the GRE again unless I find some reason to suspect that my Verbal score is too low, though it should be adequate, I think.