Clarissa

Thanks you two for your feedback! I think you got me somewhat wrong Wyatt. Probably I'm not the only one who could do with the OED when reading Milton or Spenser :-). I didn't mean to excuse my poor performance with my insufficient language skills. I was far more concerned with the awkward format (I took another version than you guys on Saturday) . Btw I am about to hand in my MA thesis in English Lit. and have completed all of my coursework in English during these last 6 years. I really do think that my English is at the NEAR - native level, with clear emphasis on near. It'll always remain my second language. So what? I think this presumable predicament simultaneously accounts for my unique subject position from which I approach the study of English Lit. (Sorry for being off -track ;-)) Thanks for pointing out that the registration has closed anyway. This way I can just try to forget about it and don't have to ponder anymore whether I should retake or not. Good luck to all of us! This is a rather stressful and emotionally intense process ...

Hi to everyone, I am new to this forum and I could really need some advice regrading the subject test that I took today. I am an international student and in my home country the test is administered on the Monday following the regular US testing date. Anyway, the test format was completely different from the format of the practice tests (Princeton review, other practice tests I found on the internet etc.). On the actual test, more than 80% of the questions were indeed reading comprehension!!! The passages were incredibly long and the related questions required a lot of rereading, skipping back and forward etc. As English is not my first language, I do not read as quickly as native speakers and occasionally could use the help of the OED. So this awkward format was definitely not playing to my strengths. I spent about 2 months preparing for the test. When taking the practice tests, I always managed to go over all of the questions and even finished early. Obviously, the practice conditions at home are quite different from the actual test itself, but believe it or not, timewise I did not manage to look at more than 70!! questions on the actual exam. In other words, I probably answered a meager 160 questions. Taking into account that some of my answers will be incorrect and that my score will be lowered even further by the error penalty, I might end up with a rather mediocre, not to say pretty bad score....;-( Do you think that the fact that I am an international student plays into how schools will evaluate my application? Should I retake the exam in October (I would have to retake before receiving the results from today's tests though)? Should I address a potentially bad score in my SOP? Any thoughts on this are very welcome!!!THANKS in advance!