When to take GRE?

[meguca]

I am a freshman in college (well technically not yet since the term hasn't started yet, but soon) and I just took a practice test with the ETS PowerPrep software. My scores were 166 Verbal (97th percentile) and 167 Quantitative (95th percentile). Should I plan on taking the GRE this year, while I still have a lot of free time left to study and prepare, since my preliminary scores are already fairly decent? I know they're valid for 5 years and I plan on graduating from my university in 3 years so that shouldn't be a problem.

I'm not so worried about Quant since I know I could've gotten 170--I was incredibly distracted with chat messages and such while doing the math questions on my computer, so both of my errors were just trivial arithmetic stuff (like 120/3=60) that I should've and would've caught otherwise. I'm kind of worried about Verbal, though, because even though my percentile is pretty high, I missed a disturbing number of questions (6 of them actually) and I don't like that at all - how should I best prepare?

I'm most concerned about the Analytical Writing section. I'd like some advice about how I can handle that.

[jmbrown88]

With scores like those, I'd go ahead and take it to get it out of the way.

[Usmivka]

Ignore the AW. ETS has a section guide that tells you how the questions are evaluated, and you could practice writing a couple and compare vs their rubric, but my personal opinion is that it is a crapshoot based on your grader. No biochemistry school will care what your AW score is, they put much more faith in the writing ability evidenced by your papers and statement of purpose.

[TeaGirl]

Most universities I was applying to say it is recommended that GRE scores be no more than 2 years old unless it's a financial burden to take the test again. I would wait a year or 2 before taking the test.