Saturday, January 13, 2007

Results

I just received my GRE results today. I apparently scored a perfect 800 for both the verbal and quantitative sections, and a shockingly mediocre 4.5/6.0 for the analytical writing section -- what should have been my strongest area! Bizarre. Unless there was some kind of clerical error, it seems I must have lost my analytical abilities for a day without realising it. Incredible. Oh well, hopefully graduate school admissions committees will disregard it after seeing my other work.

Results from my year at ANU were rather better. I was awarded a University Medal for "outstanding first class honours", and the Quentin Gibson Prize for topping my honours class. My thesis went especially well, with one marker calling it "an outstanding piece of work, easily the best thesis I’ve read in a long time." So that was nice!

6 comments:

  1. Nicely done. Those GRE scores won't guarantee admission anywhere, but they will draw a lot of positive attention to your portfolio. Which is awesome! =)

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  2. That's an incredible score, Richard. For my part, I ranked in the 93rd percentile for the analytic section, in the 68th percentile for math, and got 6.0/6.0 (95th percentile) for the essay questions.

    I'm told that philosophy graduate schools care only about the analytic section, much, much less so about the essay section, and only have a passing look at the math section. This makes sense, in a way. Consider that the people grading your essay are hardly professional philosophers, or people who philosophers have reason to get very excited about. One professor told me, "what do I care what some minimum wage worker thinks is a quality essay?"

    It looks to me like you shredded the GRE, and have every reason to be very optimistic.

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  3. Ah, well that's encouraging then, thanks. (I take it 'analytic' = 'verbal' in this context. Perhaps a difference in labels between the computer- and paper-based tests?)

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  4. Oh, yes, analytic = verbal. I took the test a few years back, and the section titles eluded me.

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