clairecate

Thought I'd weigh in just for comparison's sake. 630, 79th percentile, like the OP. I'm genuinely shocked at how high it is to be completely honest. I never scored over 45th percentile on ANY of the practice tests and was the first person out of the room after laughing and giving up on test day. Guess most of my guesses were more educated than I thought. So are we still going with the consensus that anything over 600 is considered acceptable? Or 75th%+? Broadly speaking, what do we think is the cut-off?

LOL at that test. Seriously. Unlike most of y'all, time was not an issue for me. I was the 2nd person out the door out of 40ish people in the room (10 of which were fellow lit. takers). I left 25 blank that I absolutely positively could not eliminate any of the answers for. I was actually thrilled about the fact that it was basically a reading comp test. It gave me chances to get points where ID questions would have left me stumped. I knew going in to it that I wasn't going to do well (I never scored above 40th percentile on a practice test), so I was just relieved that I finished with time to spare and that it's all over now. Honestly, though - I feel like this test is such a joke. It just isn't indicative of anything other than the ability to cram mass amounts of useless information into one's head. It has no correlation to how one will fare in an English graduate program. End of story. If this score is what keeps me from being accepted into any program, then so be it - I wouldn't want to be there anyway.

Right there with you both. Sad day. Luckily, only a handful of the schools I'm applying to require it. But still.

I didn't have a "select the sentence" question on any of my verbal sections (I had three, including the experimental), but on the power prep software there was one, and you could only select one sentence. I'm pretty sure you highlight one and if you try to highlight a second it unhighlights the first, but I could be wrong. BTW, slightly unrelated but my vocab was all laughably easy. The only time the verbal section was hard was i) reading comp and ii) when the sentences were so vague that anything seemed to work. In my second section that happened a lot, but I still knew all the words being thrown at me (literally every single one), just not which ones fit the context since there practically was no context. I ended up with a 670-770 (scored 730-800 on power prep grrr) and I'm almost positive every question I missed was reading comp-related and in the second section. Damn science passages. Good luck and don't stress too much!

This is killing me. How focused is focused supposed to be? Focused as in mention specific authors/works/critics? Do we need to explicitly discuss a very specific research question(s) and our hypotheses regarding said question(s)? Because if that is the case, I'm screwed. I have an extremely broad/general area of interest (feminist theory/crit) and I'm not entirely sure exactly what direction I want to take it in. I realize I need to lie and make up some sort of direction (because, as noted, no one will notice if I don't stick to it once admitted) but the problem then becomes....how much bullshitting do I need to do? Or is it ok to have one overarching interest with no specified time period and discuss multiple different directions I might possibly go in? Ugh. I guess this is more of a question for my LOR writers since they're professors and all, but I'd like to hear what other people are doing/have done (successfully). Also, I realize some of you are thinking that if I don't know EXACTLY what it is I want to do, then I shouldn't be applying to PhD programs. That is why I'm applying to a number of MA programs as well. I'm definitely learning towards the MA so I can get the focus I know I need - but they all seem to want very specific SOPs as well.

I took the revised test this past Friday. Powerprep 2 days before - V: 730-800 Q: 740-800 Real thing - V: 670-770 Q: 730-800 I'm not sure how I did so much worse on Verbal, except that my second section was insanely hard reading comp-wise and was my very last section of the day so I was kind of over it at that point. Still, as long as I'm at 90th percentile I'll be happy. The question is...is it? Ah, the waiting game.

This is both an answer to your query as well as a question in itself - At my school there was a difference between graduating with honors (being part of the honors program from day one as a freshman) and graduating specifically with honors ("departmental distinction") in English/whatever your major was. As a distinction candidate in English, one of the requirements was to EITHER i) write a thesis or ii) take a 6000-level proseminar/graduate level course with the PhD students. I opted to take the course (in which I got an A) due to the fact that I was already taking 15 hours of advanced-level, writing-intensive English and Poli Sci classes. I also knew the professor - I had taken him in undergrad - and the class (Modern Rhetorical Theory in case you're interested) was based almost entirely on discussion/participation with one short paper at the end (ironically, it was the least writing/research-intensive of all 6 classes I took that semester). So no, at my undergrad institution, the thesis was not required. As for the question, how do y'all think my choice to take a graduate-level class holds up to having a thesis? Keeping in mind that the professor who taught it will be writing one of my recommendations (and therefore will be able to directly comment on my ability to handle graduate-level work), do you think this holds up at all in the eyes of an adcomm to the experience gained from having written a thesis? Unfortunately, I have no interest in rhet/comp and therefore can't really use the class as a major factor in my SoP/research interests, though I plan to make use of it somehow. I'm interested to hear both your thoughts on how this looks to an adcomm as well as whether any of the rest of you had this option as an undergrad.

I'm another October taker, and I just wanted to give a huge thank you to everyone that has contributed study material info to this thread. In my cubicle at work, I am surrounded by Nortons of all kinds (Brit Lit., Lit. by Women, World Masterpieces, Am. Lit., Greenblatt's Shakespeare), notes from college, and various Masterplot volumes (currently have 5 of the umpteen here) plus the two practice tests I could scrounge up and the Princeton Review study guide. Yesterday, by some struck of Google luck, I stumbled across this forum and my anxiety level plummeted. Just the knowledge that there are, in fact, others out there going through the same mess is profoundly comforting.