Bombing the test

In My Humble Opinion
1

Anyone ever bomb a test? I am asking because I took the GRE today and choked on the math section worse than I’ve ever done in my life. I spent way too long lingering over some of the early questions and before I knew it, I had something ridiculous like 15 minutes remaining to do 20 questions. I just made those numbers up but it was pretty bad. After that, I got all jittery and all I could think about was how I didn’t have enough time left. Even the stuff I’ve known cold since ninth grade algebra I blanked on. Maybe I just had a mini-stroke and lost 15 minutes as well as a few thousand brain cells. Or more likely, I didn’t do enough practice tests on the computer and panicked. (I mostly studied at work from a Princeton review book.) I knew there was no way in hell I did ok, so I canceled my scores at the end.

Well, I have learned from my mistakes and will try to get my hands on every practice CD I can find. On the plus side, I think I did well on the verbal, even though I was all out of sorts after the quantitative. I could tell because one of the last questions was asking for the antonym of a word I don’t think I’ve even seen before let alone knew the meaning of. Why can’t the math come so naturally to me?

So fellow Dopers, please help me feel better by telling me about the times you maybe didn’t do so well as you expected or hoped, and how it failed to ruin your otherwise productive and successful lives.

2

Did you get the scores? I thought that almost all of the GRE administrations were on computer now. Mine was a couple of years ago.

I was a very ambitious college student and my sophomore year, I took a class on Ancient Greek Civilization. The professor was great but I didn’t get the memo that his class and test were extremely difficult. I studied for the first test or at least I thought I did. I spent about 12 hours the day before. I took the test and thought that I did Ok but not great. I got it back and it had a big F- 45 on it. I was devastated but I was determined to redeem myself. We had papers to do and I threw myself into them getting the highest grade in the (large) class on one of them. He offered extra credit papers that were quite demanding and I did two of them. I got a B+ on the second test and an A on the final. It turns out, he really was a hard-ass and I got a B- in the class because that is the way his grading scale worked and that was it.

3

Yeah, it was on the computer. At the end of the test, they give you the option of canceling and if you choose that, you don’t get your scores and it doesn’t appear on your score report. If I wasn’t certain that I did horribly, then I would’ve gone ahead and sent them, even if I didn’t think they were the best I could do.

4

The first time I took the LSATs I had a sort of panic attack in the middle. I don’t know how I did because I cancelled the scores. I doubt I did very well seeing as I didn’t answer an entire section. I don’t know what came over me.

The next time I took them I got an extremely high score-which was probably responsible for sending me to the school I ended up at, because my GPA from undergrad was pretty dismal, and way below my school’s average. I also went on to teach the LSATs for Kaplan.

What grad program are you applying for? I’m curious because a couple of my friends are in the liberal arts (English and the like) and they boned the quantitative part of their exams and it didn’t seem to really matter to their departments. They’re at good schools.

Your life is not ruined, trust me.

5

I want to get my master’s in public health, so I don’t need a great score, just something decent. But I think I have the capacity to do well, so it was really a disappointment to choke like that. I also feel like a great GRE score would make up for lackluster recommendations.

6

I once hyperventillated during an exam.

See, Differential Equations should have been a pre-requisite for that class. But they had to set up the cirriculum so that it was theoretically possible to finish in 8 semesters. So you had a bunch of people with only a semester of calculus trying to understand diff eqs. It wasn’t pretty at all.
Somehow I managed to pass that class, and eventually came to understand all that I should have learned.

7

I choked on the GMAT, and got a 575 (which I think was like 70th percentile). I took it again the next time around and got a 690 (98th). Got into Michigan with that one.

All benefits from the Michigan MBA were tangential, since I didn’t pursue a management career after I got it.

8

My high school had a comprehensive exam you had to pass before you could graduate. I took the test and it seemed pretty easy. I was done way before the time was called. In fact, only little more than half the time allowed had passed.

I’d never been one to worry about finishing an exam too quickly (I’ve always worked fast), but this seemed too bizarre. So I went over all my questions again, and again, and again. All seemed well.

Then I looked around and my classmates were still working away. How could they still be working when I had been finished for so long? I went back and (for probably the 10th time) reviewed my answers. For some reason, superstition set in and I refused to turn my exam in first. I’d never done that before, but something seemed wrong.

Finally, someone else turned in their exam. There was maybe 20 minutes left of a three hour test. I did a quick once over of my exam booklet and answer sheet. That’s when I noticed that my exam book pages said “Page 1 of 10, Page 2 of 10,” etc. Of course, I had only 6 pages. Somehow, the last 4 pages of my exam booklet (2 sheets front and back) were never attached.

I rushed up to the prefect to explain my predicament, but she was not sympathetic. Yeah, I should have noticed earlier that the pages were numbered "1 of 1)"and so on. I got another exam book and rushed back to my seat to try frantically to finish the final 4 pages in the time remaining. I didn’t finish. I left the room crying my eyes out.

I told my counselor who repeated what the prefect said: I should have seen that there were supposed to be more pages. I told my parents and they were FURIOUS. How could I be so careless? Didn’t I realize that much of the material hadn’t been covered? This was just like me to get cocky and not pay attention.

I passed but barely. I mean, I passed by the skin of my teeth. If I had missed a couple more questions, I’d have failed. To be honest, I would have gotten another chance to take the test, but failing was such a huge humiliation. No one wanted to fail.

22 years later, my parents STILL bring that up when they want to rib me about not paying enough attention to something or being careless. :rolleyes: