Just to throw in my $0.02, I just took them today, and I found the experience overall to be easier than I expected, though as noted gradually increased in difficulty as the sections progressed.
One of the things that led to my expectation of serious challenge was that I did some of the Magoosh GRE prep course online. On the whole, it seems to be an amazingly good and thorough prep for the revised GRE; I particularly like the fact that after each question they not only give you a solution, but a video showing how they arrived at that solution - brilliant! However, the free selection of questions that they provide pretty much put the fear of god into me... I got just 29% right of 18 quantitative questions! A far cry from the 780 math score I got 18 years ago when I first took the GREs.
However after taking the Princeton and ETS samples I felt a little better... Not nearly as mind-wrenching. I still was pretty nervous though, since - for a variety of reasons - I only realized I needed to take the GREs last week, and I only had 2 real days to study (aka cram). I pulled a lot of great info from the ETS site, but the Math Review guide re-scared me... I barely made it through the first two sections before I was having terrible flashbacks to high school. It's been since 1986 that I've done any real math, and since 1993 that I last took the GREs and had to think about things like polynomials and systems of equations, etc.
So the actual test was not so bad, though I was on unsteady ground a few times, particularly with the math. When all was said and done, I got a preliminary score of 680-780 quant, 690-790 verbal, but I'm not sure what that means and how the writing sections will be factored in to create a final score. From what I can determine from online resources, this translates to a score of about 162-169 under the new scoring system (130-170), which will be more than sufficient for the program to which I am applying.
Am I right in thinking that this session, getting our scores back in Nov., will be the FIRST set of official scores in the new system?
Good luck, all!
Mattynabib
