Xanthe

My post has now been buried but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who responded here and who sent me PMs encouraging me not to lose hope or think poorly of myself during this process. Just knowing other people relate to what I am going through is a huge comfort. On that note, I too got the official Berkeley rejection e-mail today .

I'm mostly a lurker, but I felt the need to come out and post something. This is my second cycle. I got rejected across the board last time - except for an MA program that I couldn't afford. I put everything into applying again. My GRE quant score really hurt me last time, and doubled I down this year on my efforts to improve it. Unfortunately, I never reached the scores most of the admits seem to have (163+), and ended up topping out at 158. I didn't get e-mails from Duke or Berkeley, which pretty much means I'm finished with both of them. The Berkeley one really hurt. I visited the campus last fall and fell in love. I genuinely wanted to go there and am crushed. I cannot bear the thought of not getting in anywhere again this cycle because it basically means I'm finished with most of the schools I would want to go to. There is really no point to this post other than just getting these feelings off my chest. No on in real life understands how stressful this is. All I hear from my family and friends is "of course you'll get in!" If only they knew the truth of how things really are .

I think you are overthinking this just a tad. It would be extremely unethical for them to use this study to somehow increase the difficulty of your actual GRE without you knowing. For the record, all the tests seem to be some variation of similar questions (I've done five now) and none of them seem particularly easier than the other. I've got wildly different numbers correct (18 to 11) and I haven't seen a change in the difficulty. What I do not like about the format is that it is rather difficult to understand when it comes to rounding. I've gotten at least half of my wrong answers wrong because I was confused over what number to actually put in. This is what leads me to believe this is some type of test of how well you respond to awkwardly phrased questions and completely wide open answer choices.

De-lurking to say that I feel like my chances for UNC are over since I didn't get asked for an interview. Does anyone know if they interview everyone?

Can anyone direct me to some good resources for studying vocab for the revised GRE? Barrons has deleted their vocabulary list from their new revised addition so I'm wondering if using the old edition lists for vocab would be sufficient for the revised test?

Hey everyone! I've spent a while reading up on the posts here and they have been amazingly helpful. I chose to take a year off between undergrad and grad in order to get some life experience (i.e. get a real job) and focus myself on what I really want to do, so I haven't had the luxury of getting to speak with similarly focused students and professors every day while I plod through the application process. Resources like gradcafe have been immeasurable. I chose to sign up and post because my GRE date is getting closer (August 6th) and I'm really starting to panic. I suck at standardized testing math. I scored in the 97th and 96th percentiles on the SAT for writing and reading... but scored in the 37th for math. Yep, it was that bad. I can only imagine how much worse it is going to be on the GRE and I'm starting to feel like this math score is the only thing separating me from a top school. I have a 3.89 GPA from a top 25 overall UG (top 3 public), graduated high distinction and Phi Beta Kappa, and wrote an honors thesis written on the subject I'd like to pursue in grad school. I'm looking at a job with a political figure right now (trying to remain somewhat anonymous here) and am definitely not taking a year off just to fool around. In fact, part of the reason for taking the year off was to try to get good enough at math to get into the likes of Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown. I'm starting to feel like that isn't going to happen though. I have three weeks to go and I don't feel like I'm making much progress with the studying I'm doing for math. I'm putting in a minimum of 1-2 hours a day reviewing study guides and doing practice problems, but every time I try to do a practice test set I fall flat. I look at the acceptance threads and my heart sinks because I'm slowly convincing myself (to my detriment I'm sure) that a 500 or below on the quant is all it's going to take to keep me out of a political science program at my dream school. Having my professors tell me that math means everything now for top poli sci schools only further feeds my angst. So basically I'm looking for any advice on how to improve your math score when you are just hopeless at testing math and whether or not you think having a horrible quant score is enough to kill the rest of your application. Personal experience is definitely welcome. Thanks!