I went and took a practice GRE today. It was given by Kaplan, I guess as a "look how bad you did... you need our test prep services" kinda gig. It was basically just like the SAT. The practice test we did had an easy-cheesy math section, and then a pretty hard verbal section. (Just like the SAT, right?) The tricky thing is that they changed the format a couple years back, and now you take it on a computer, and the test is "adaptive," meaning that if you do well, it'll give you harder questions that are worth more points, and if you do bad, it'll assume that you're stupid and give you easier questions that are worth chump change. So basically, if you mess up at the very beginning, you're thoroughly jacked! Yea... I missed the third one on verbal, hahaha.

For the math, I had it in my mind that they'd test us on something crazy, like vector calc, or PDE's and that junk- but nope, it's all stuff that you'd know after high school geometry or so. On the math, the most noticeable difference was that you can't have a calculator, which, if you're smart about it, just tips you off to the fact that you're supposed to use approximations any time the numbers aren't pretty. Seriously though... they must have tested variations on the Pythagorean theorem like on nearly half the questions. I felt pretty good about the math, but there's always stupid mistakes. =/

Then, the verbal section, despite its superficial similarity to the SAT, was seriously like 10 times harder. And they added in an antonyms section. But yea, towards the end, it got so freaking hard. I mean, what the heck do "saturnine" and "jejune" mean??? Craziness. But yea, hopefully any engineering graduate program won't be too concerned with the verbal part, haha. Here's that problem #3 that I missed...

SCRUTINIZE : OBSERVE ::
A) excite : pique
B) beseech: request
C) search : discover
D) smile : grin
E) dive: jump

...the correct answer is B, but I put D. =/ Stupid test, grrrrrr, hahaha.