test -- over
Yes. Over. At least it's over. It's true I know a heck of a lot more than I did 15 years ago (the last time I took it), I don't know how much that increased knowledge helped me. Because, you see, everything after Chaucer and before the Romantics is all a big blur to me. I'm ok enough with the basics of Shakespeare, so pull that out of the blur. But all those poets? Can't keep them straight in my head. Such is life.
My good deeds for the day included keeping an eye out for people carrying campus maps at 7:45am and bringing them along to the building. I only met one, a girl from UCDavis who was taking the chemistry test; she mentioned that she only scored in something like the 5th percentile on the practice tests and was freaked out about it all, but then her TA in a chem class (a grad student) told her he did similarly poorly on the test and there he was at UCDavis. Interesting. I was just happy to see a girl taking the chemistry test.
The room in which I took the test also contained people taking the biology, physics, and computer science tests. There were two people taking the CS test—both guys. There were perhaps fifteen people taking the physics test—probably 12/15 were guys. The physics folks were by far the most unkempt, smelly, self-absorbed people in the room, and were also the ones who had the most trouble
filling out the basic identification part of the form. Make of that what you will. The largest group of people were the ones taking the biology test—probably twenty of them, and the majority were women.
Two people were taking the literature test—myself and another girl who was really freaked out about it. I passed on the wisdom I learned from others: "if it's about a whale, Melville
is the answer."
I finished the test in approx 2 hours. This does not mean I did spectacularly on it, it just means I read quickly, I know what I know, if I don't know it I know I'm not going to know it by sitting and thinking harder so I do process of elimination and hope for the best.
I'm thinking I did poorly. Luckily, of the seven schools to which I am applying, four don't require this score! yay!
