Well, the GRE is all done with. All in all I found it distressingly easy. I was taking the paper version and since the nearest testing center is in Egypt and I don’t feel like paying $600 to take a four hour test. The questions on the paper version are grouped in sets of easy, medium and hard. I kept getting to hard questions and thinking them easy. This leaves two possibilities:

1. I am amazingly intelligent and capable of such quick discernment that the questions were beneath me
2. The questions included a trick that changed the answer and I missed the trick

Given that I couldn’t generally see the trick, #2 is significantly more likely. I’ll find out in about two months one way or another.

One nice break though was the essay question. The prompt was something like, “a university education should offer a breadth of courses to ‘truly educate’ a student.” One of the courses I took at TTU for entrance into the Honors Program was Honors 101. For that class we had to do a paper where we went around interviewing various people on four subjects:

• The purpose of a university education
• The function of the sciences in a university education
• The function of the humanities in a university education
• The meaning of life

So, I had already written this essay. It was better than that though because later in college I went to a couple conferences and was part of a panel that talked about the pedagogy of Honors 101 and my part of the presentation was the paper. Depending on time I would often summarize some of the different positions that students might take on the issues. In short, I spanked it. Not that Berkeley will care.

I did though do my essay in pen and that is an error whose magnitude has as of yet to be seen. There was nothing on the sheet to tell me not to do it in pen, but in the instructions for the test it mentioned not using pens in general. So, hopefully they don’t throw out my scores for illegal ink usage.