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Yes indeed. Monday.

Best of luck to all who are taking it tomorrow! And for those of use who took it in September, and who get our scores on Monday...

In re that list, I know that Ohio State, at least, discontinued their terminal MA program a couple of years ago. Also, I've heard the same thing sometimes said about the reputation of MAs from Oxbridge as about ones from NYU and UC--since they don't generally fund, they're happy to take students who might not otherwise make the cut but who are willing to pay. If you're also looking at Medieval Studies MAs as well as just English ones, Kalamazoo and York should be on the list.

Yes--I certainly hadn't meant to suggest that newly admitted students should swagger in and demand more money, or that there is even always necessarily room for that kind of discussion! I only used the funding example because that was the specific one given to me by a prof when he gave me a sit-down about the need to be proactive in articulating your needs and concerns with programs post-admittance. And like you say, for most of us the cart is practically lapping the horse at this point.

It's also the time when you can actively press programs on points that might otherwise give you pause about attending. A school that's given you an acceptance has done so because the department really wants you to attend, and apparently (so I've been told by two profs and a DGS) admitted students don't quite realize that, or are often reluctant to follow that thought to its conclusion. They feel just so pleased to have gotten an acceptance from the department that they get all dewy-eyed and "awww shucks, it's an honor just to have been nominated!" and miss out on the actual horse trading that can be involved. An example: a prof was telling me about the last time he was on the admissions committee, a couple of years ago. There was this student they were all really keen on, and the prof and the DGS were meeting with the student at the welcome/preview weekend thing. The DGS kept trying to get the student to explicitly ask for more money, and apparently the student just didn't realize it. "What could we do to encourage you to attend Big State U?" the DGS asks. The student gives some general, job-interview-esque answer. The DGS says "No, really--what can we do?" The conversation continues, with the DGS asking in ever more farcical and obvious ways, and with the student still failing to grasp what the whole point of the conversation actually was. I'm not saying to walk in and be like "More monies, please." But if you have concerns about a program, mention them. Maybe you're concerned about funding, but maybe you just want to ensure you'll be able to do more interdisciplinary coursework and have it count for your requirements. Either way, that's the time to ask the department questions about those kinds of things!

I took it a couple of weeks ago--the week right after the subject test, which was maybe perhaps not the finest moment in the history of standardized test scheduling. Just out of curiosity, when you say you'll retake it if you don't break 160, do you mean verbal or quant? I ended up with a quant score just over 160, but if I hadn't--which I certainly didn't expect to, given my practice scores--I honestly can't imagine wanting to retake the whole damn thing again just to try to boost that, especially given (as mikers88 points out) its relative unimportance compared with the verbal score. One of the reasons I took the test when I did, even though it was right after the subject one, was so that I'd have time to retake it if necessary--but I've heard so many stories of retakes going poorly (and in weirdly unexpected ways) that the thought of retaking it gives me the willies. Honestly, I have half a mind to start a haunted house for English graduate school applicants, one room of which would have nothing in it besides a solitary desk, a stack of subject test and quantitative questions, and a very, very large clock.

Obviously you shouldn't mislead programs, but don't sell yourself short, either, especially given, as you say, the relatively low bar that most programs set for reading ability! And keep in mind that's what programs are after--it's not like you're going to go for an on-campus visit, or start your classes in the fall, and they're suddenly going to try to quiz you in French. They want to know if you're able to read scholarship in the field with a dictionary, not if you can answer their on-the-spot questions in French on Baudelaire or baguettes or how to get to the nearest pharmacy, and as you've seen the reading tests are usually actually pretty easy! But what to put for languages that don't show up on your transcript is a question, and one I'm dealing with, too. I've never taken an undergraduate German class, but have solid German reading ability (and my writing sample uses several German language sources), so I've listed myself has having "reading proficiency" on the applications that allow more discursive answers, and just plain drew a (reasonable) number out of the air for the ones that required a specific number of years of study. I agree with Wyatt's Torch that it sounds like your French ability--assuming you've kept it up, and can comfortably read simple texts, or at least suss out their syntax, if not their vocabulary--is more intermediate than basic. If you feel like "intermediate" is not an accurate reflection of your skill set, then sure, put "basic," but I wouldn't shy away from "intermediate" just because you've never had an undergraduate course in it. Another thing to consider is differences in field. I'm applying to do work on medieval texts, and so my SOP talks at some length (okay, a paragraph) about my relevant linguistic preparation, which is where the evaluation of my linguistic skills by committee members is predominantly going to come from (and from my writing sample, of course, which is pretty heavy on the philology), not from the check box on the online application. If you're in a field where language work isn't as important, and so that sort of thing doesn't belong in your SOP, then, sure, that box is where they'll look. But a corollary of that is that then that box is itself less important, as long as it's checked!

I second this. About the only things I have left for my apps are finalizing the last round of edits on my writing sample and getting the last of my profs to sign off on my SOP, but I'm done with about half of the actual applications (minus those sections, of course). WT's right about them being a bit of a time sink, but there's another reason to get started on them early: quite unexpectedly, filling them out this past weekend made me so, so excited about the process, because it made it so much more concrete. It's one thing to say, "Oh, I'm applying to study at X. Y, and Z" in the abstract; it's (apparently) another thing altogether to actually do it!

Same to you! And I'm so, so sorry for my egregiously late reply! This first chunk of October has been ridiculously busy for me--I took both general and subject GREs, started the apps proper, revised my SOP for roughly the 4,000th through 4,002nd times, and wrote and submitted a proposal for a manuscript studies conference--all on top of my five courses that require a lot of time in the library doing translations, transcriptions, and general research. Blech. Hopefully I'll be able to be around GC a bit more in the coming months, now that a lot of that 's out of the way! And I'm nervous about getting into ND, too. I have plenty of "reach" programs on my list (perhaps too many), but there's a special fondness in my heart for ND--partially because my advisor did their PhD there, but also because of the amazing opportunities for interdisciplinary work, and paleographic and manuscript studies work specifically, and the ginormous research support students get. At the same time, though, the simple fact is that with their Anglo-Saxonist situation so much in flux, if I don't get it (which is overwhelmingly likely) I won't be terribly crushed. Notre Dame is actually the only medieval studies program I'm applying to. The rest are all English, and the list is about what you'd expect for an Anglo-Saxonist: Berkeley, Yale, Cornell, Urbana, WashU, etc.

They do, at least the ones I'm familiar with! This varies of course, and by discipline--medievalists are notoriously cranky about place a higher emphasis on language skills. But even there, it's not uncommon for students to enter with only one language. At my school (big top 30 R1 state school, pretty strong in medieval lit), it's certainly not expected that everyone arrives with two languages, even though some do. There's plenty of support for picking up a language once you arrive, whether in summer classes, reading groups, or regular ol' introductory language sequences (often audited, since they don't supply grad credit).

Oh, and like WT says, there's this: all the evidence suggests your performance on the exam doesn't really matter anyway, especially for someone--like you, hreaðemus--who's an astonishingly strong applicant in all other respects.

It's not dumb: aside from, I think, being generally just the best advice that can be given about any exam, I think it's especially true about this one. It could be the case that I totally bombed it--we'll know on the 27th!--but I walked out of there actually feeling fairly confident, and think I could have spared myself a ton of worry in the lead up to the test. A shocking amount of material was stuff that I'd read, and stuff that I'd think most English majors will have at least a passing familiarity with. Moreover, there were so many questions that were so easily handled by the process of elimination that even though I didn't "know" the material, I was able to get the question right. And paradoxically, while those two made me feel better because I know I got some right, knowing there were some I simply couldn't answer was also strangely reassuring; there were a few questions (of the ID type as opposed to reading comprehension) that I couldn't even attempt, at all, because I had zero knowledge of any of the options given, or the question asked for very specific, fact-type information. There will be stuff on there you've read, and stuff on there you haven't: the former will be laughably easy to answer, the latter might well be impossible to. But that's the case for everyone, and strangely, I took a fair bit of comfort in that. Sure, I could have maybe studied more, but there's no way to read everything in the canon of Anglophone literature and international literary theory from the past 1400 years, which means that there will always be some questions you will not be able to confidently answer with either your own knowledge or through the process of elimination. Accepting that, that your performance on the exam won't be perfect and very much can't be, is delightfully freeing.

But just think how much that newfound, hard-won mythographic knowledge will help you on the subject exam!

It sure freaked me out, both in test preparation and during the actual exam: when I took it this past weekend, my second verbal section was way, way easier than the first--which caused me to, if not panic, at least have a moment (or three) of genuine "awww crap." But then the fifth section I got was a verbal one that was considerably harder than any of the others (or any of the practice sections I'd taken) and I got a score I'm really happy with, so I'm assuming that middle section was the research one. That time I spent--not that it was a lot; but not that 35 minutes is a lot of time, either--pondering that and being concerned and then telling myself to focus on the test section at hand was time I could have spent answering actual questions. Moral of the story: all of my worrying and fretting--like, I'd assume, the vast majority of all the worrying and fretting that has characterized my progress through this process, and that I know other people struggle with, too--was ultimately unhelpful, unproductive, and misplaced. Just go in, do your best, kick its ass, and go from there!

This is helpful, but I think the OP's point is that his wife is looking to be admitted to a program in English, rather than in the Arabic program. I think that kind of cross-posting to teach languages is more common with students in Comp Lit than with students in straight English programs.

Thanks so much, mollifiedmolloy! I'm just going with three other letters for everywhere else, but since I'd (thinking ND required four) already asked a fourth prof to write one for them, you're right--I might as well keep him! Plus, he was my medieval Latin prof, so he'll be able to speak to ND's emphasis on Latinity. Double plus, it'd just be awkward at this point to say "Whoops! You aren't needed after all, thanks though."

Hey, other Notre Dame applicants--for some reason I'd been thinking that the Medieval Institute required four letters of recommendation, but now I can't for the life of me find that information anywhere. There's a place where it says to submit "no more than four" letters, but the general grad school app just says three are required--did I just completely make the fourth letter requirement up in my head?

Welcome, ToldAgain!

My experience of timing was a bit different than everybody else's, but because I hadn't really taken the practice tests in a full "practice" mode--I just circled the answers on the practice test, rather than bubbling them in separately. In retrospect not the wisest of plans--bubbling took much more time than I anticipated! I had finished the two practice tests with a full hour left on my time, but in the actual test (the difficulty level of which I found roughly comparable to the practice tests) I finished only with closer to twenty minutes left. Not a big deal--I still had time, of course--but like you say: a surprise, and one I could have avoided by making my practice test regimen more reflective of the actual test.

I feel pretty good about it, too. It's funny… Last night it's about nine thirty or so, about my bedtime, and I think "Gee, let's crack open the ol' Norton and read just a few more things"--two of which ended up on the exam!

Well, that's over with! How's everyone feeling about it?

Thanks for the well wishes, and the same to you and to everyone else who's also sitting it then. I have to say, I'm so looking forward to being done with the testing portion of this process!

Just to add to the chorus, yeah, I think it's of the utmost importance--even though my sample is in Chicago style (where there are full citations of works in the footnotes, making the works cited pages, strictly speaking, less important than it is in MLA), I'd still not send it off without the full list at back. I am, however, going to be far more willing to play with the formatting of those pages in service of making limits (single-spacing it, for example) than with the body of my sample.

Very helpful indeed--thanks!

Howdy all--I hope everyone's studying goes well! I took two practice tests today which left me feeling pretty good about where I'm at, but this left me wondering: does anyone have any idea how well the available practice tests tend to track with the actual exams in terms of scores/difficulty/standardization?