You will be, but everyone will be. I took it last year, right now is my year off. Still have to edit my portfolio and write my essays, the rest is nothing. Start contacting people for reccs.

After I take it I am going to contact the reccs. - I have informaly told them that I would like to use them as reccs. - so they know. The pimps around here say that they don't look at GPA (assuming yours is bad) but if it is a good GPA it surley has to have some weight.

took it last saturday. What a horrible way to spend a day off! And if you get the same guy sitting next to you that was continuously shaking his leg throughout the entire test, please feel free to lay the smack down for me.

much appreciated.

i am taking it the 29th, and i have barely studied. does anyone think its worth it to retake the test if you flop?

Dasein, I have been studying for 4 months flashcards and all but I feel really nervous and unprepared becuase you never know what kind of curve balls they are going to throw on the test. The ETS gets no stars in my pimp book.

I took it a couple of weeks ago. I studied for a month, did average ( i think?) on the verbal, above average on the quantitative, havent received the written scores yet. I studied lots of vocab which didnt help me all that much in the test. I would recomend studying vocab like 6 months in advance. I found that alot of the new words i studied showed up on the test but they were compared with other words that i didnt know. So that fucked me. What really hurt me was the reading comprehension articles in the test were almost 2-3 times as long as the ones i studied with in powerprep software. I am naturally a slow reader and although i comprehended just fine it made me have to ruch in the end of the sections. I did alot better in the software tests than on the actual because of this.

For my own curiosity, In the powerprep they have charts listing the scores by area of study...how accurate are these. I talked to someone asking if my verbal score was too low for the ivy leagues and he told me to call and ask.. Yale was the only one that said "well, if your scoring in the 300s or 400s you shouldnt be applying to yale." But none had specific cut off points like I had heard. I scored in the upper 400s on verbal so it concerned me.

Didnt have the leg guy, but the head phones were pimp!

500 to 550 is what they say in the book. I would say that is fair.

I think I will be rockin the head phones too during the test. If I get someone twitching next to me I will ask to be moved for sure.

study vocab for 6 months!!! WTF that seems slightly absurd.
with 4 years of university behind us you would think we've retained something.
the GRE's are meant to show how generally smart you are regardless of studying, so its rather counter-intuitve to study for test which you aren't meant to study for, yet everyone studies anyway to get a good score and give the impression they are smart.
This is rather cynical of me, but, its probably set up that way so GRE can suck as much money from us poor college kids as possible, buying their crappy one-time software and study books. otherwise we are supposedly screwed.
THank goodness Canadian Universities never bought into this,
unfortunately for me the arch school i want to attend is in the US, and yes, I'll be buying all these aids too.

I think studying and and looking like your smart is better than not studying and looking like your an ass.

damn domestic, it may sound absurd but it was only a suggestion from my experience. You'll be really fucking surpised to see how many words you have never even seen or heard before on the test with analogies that you have never heard or seen either. And i think in many cases, shit that is on the test are things you havent touched or used since highschool. So a review is the very least you should do (for quantitative at least) The only help the college years could provide is in the critical and analysis wiriting portions (directly of course). I didnt study vocab in college besides the various words in texts I encountered or architectural vocab..did you? And they dont ask architectural terms ...except butress... that was easy.

oh yeah.....pimp, what book do you speak of?

It is Cracking the GRE by the Princeton Review 2005. It has a chart that has various scrores that you should aim for with respect to your selected program of interest. It doesn't specifically say "Architecture" but it says "Art and Humanities" 500 to 550 score.

anyone taking a class for it, any opnions on that would be helpful..

As far as I can tell average GRE scores to top-ten programs are a bit higher than this - I'd say 600s are more typical. However: I had classmates whose scores were as low as the mid 300s and as high as 800s on all sections - so I really wouldn't write off any schools based on averages.
For studying vocabulary I'd recommend the Barron's book. For getting a general familiarity with the test format, what you might encounter and how you'll really probably do: there's no substitute for the books that the GRE people publish that contain full-length actual former tests.

El Thomas just got done taking the Princeton Review GRE class.

gre.org has one test you can print out, and two computer practice tests. I found it pretty helpful to go through them. I feel like the GRE is an SAT I for college students. I wouldn't fret that much. If you study every night for
2 hours for 2 weeks it is the best prep you can get. If you study longer you just freak yourself out, and shorter might not cover all the info you need to know.

i wouldn't get yourself too concerned with the gre's. they are cake. spend a couple on weekends holed up in prep and you'll be fine. your portfolio is the thing. of course if you don't have a portfolio, then you'd better ace the gre's.