Subseaguy

The GRE is section adaptive, unlike the GMAT which adapts to each question you answer rightly or wrongly. On the GRE you get a harder section when u've done well on the previous section. The jump in difficulty on my first two sections from my test last year and my power prep scores was what unsettled me. Considering how much better prepared I was this time around than last year, I'm suspecting the test algorithm compensates u more for answering difficult questions and u probably do not have to answer all 40 questions right to get a 170.

Got back from the test centre today and I'm totally gutted. I'm a retaker(Q159 August 2013) who overprepared for today's test, yet I fell miserably short of my expectations. Cancelled mid-way through the test because I felt there was no point continuing and ending up with what would be a subpar score. Power prep does not accurately reflect the difficulty level of the exam... Below are my power prep scores that were simulated as close as possible to exam settings(All timed): =================================== PP 2 Q 163 V 158 --- 12/12/2014 (Q35/40) PP 1 Q 164 V 161 --- 12/15/2014 (Q36/40) Could have got a 169/170 in this test but made a few careless errors in the first Math section. 3 mixed practice set in the recent ETS Quant book( Untimed) --- 92% 69/75 Magoosh score predictor -- 159-164 ( 572 quant Qs answered) Completed about half of 5lb GRE quant and had a fairly good hit rate there as well. ==================================== So after working my butt off for the past 3 weeks and really hoping for a 5 to 6 point improvement on my quant score from last year I was in for a rude shock at the test centre today. I saw some really convoluted geometry questions I'd never seen any where else. On the GRE last year I finished the first two quant sections with ten minutes to spare/review my mistakes. The third section was what killed me. On today's test in the first section I was already running out of time by the 16th question. I had to guess on three to four questions. Something that's never happened on any of my mock sessions this year or last year when I prepared. I chalked up my experience in the first quant section to it just being the experimental section. In the second quant section a similar thing happened, after ten mid level difficulty problems I was stumped by 2-3 geometry problems that were just subtler and trickier than anything I'd ever seen. For a 160 scorer i felt these sort of questions were supposed to be reserved for the last section if you've done really well in the first section. By the time I got to the DI section which was usually my forte in all my tests and saw a DI combined with overlapping sets and percentages that's when I knew I had just about had enough of ETS' b**sing. Why give us a deceptively easy mock test that does not accurately mimic the difficulty of the real exam? I have no issues with a challenging exam but please release mocks/ resources that accurately reflect the dificulty of what test takers would see test day. I came back home and looked at some of the problems on the power prep tests I took recently and noticed how those on the first and second quant portion of my exam had extra/subtle layers of difficulty. Verbal felt normal to the powerprep's difficulty in comparison, and I feel if I'm going to write the test again that's the only place I may accrue point gains as ETS is just screwing us over with quant right now. But it's really futile cos I'm applying to engineering programs and no one cares a jot about your verbal score. I've also wondered what if i finished and still ended up with a 163 or 164. It may be that the GRE algorithm is now quite different from the algorithm on the Power Prep software and getting a 29-32/40 could still land you in a 164/165? I may resit for the test in January but I can't think of any resource that can prepare me adequately for the kind of problems I saw today. I've used virtually everything.