I just got home from taking the GRE. The two essay sections have not yet been graded (obviously), but I received my scores for the multiple choice sections immediately. I don’t know what it means percentile wise since I don’t have a complete score, and the percentile is calculated in terms of how other people did, but I scored far better than I expected, or could have hoped for.

Out of the eighty questions I got five wrong. Two on the verbal, and three on the math.

Unlike on my practice tests, I don’t get to see which ones I got wrong. I wish I did solely for my own curiosity. Were those the questions I had some trouble with and that took me forever to solve? Or were there other, deceptively easy questions that I misjudged? Did I get the same kind of questions wrong on the actual exam that I was getting wrong on the practice tests?

Yes, I know none of this matters. But still.

Once the test ended I figured out which one was the experimental section. I thought it might have been, but I wasn’t about to anger the GRE and not try my hardest on it anyway. And who knows, maybe I am wrong. They don’t actually tell you, but considering the score I got, the experimental section must have been the math one in the middle that made absolutely no sense. If it had been a real section my quantitative score would have been far lower. Like so much far lower I would have dove into negative points. “What did you get on the GRE?” “Negative five.” “What??”

I don’t have to do this anymore. Oh my God. I don’t have to do this anymore!

Now I can really start studying for the fun GRE. Not that any part of the GRE is fun, but at least the subject test will be about things I am more or less interested in. Not that I am not incredibly interested in trigonometry, but literature is kind of my thing. Sometimes.

With my luck, I will have to read eighty thousand post colonial novels.