GREedy

[icepixie]

I did the whole practice subject GRE in English the other night. The good news is that I got more questions right than wrong, and, assuming I performed all the incantations and rituals necessary to convert the scores from raw to the 200-800 scale, it looks like on that particular version of the test, I made somewhere between a 650 and a 700.

There are four areas I'm going to fail miserably at on any version. My biblical knowledge is very, very poor. My ability to understand reference to classical Greek and Roman literature is not much better. And I completely bypassed the Jacobean through Restoration periods in my coursework, with the grudging exceptions of Paradise Lost and some Herbert. I'm hopeless with literary critics. (Also, for some reason, on the four questions that featured one, the other, or both of them, I consistently mixed up T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. I obviously need to look up both of them. Didn't one of them write the book Cats is based on...?)

But hey, for most of the Romantics, the Victorians, the Modernists, the Postmodernists, and anyone after them, I'm golden. I'm pretty good with the medievals, thanks to Anglo-Saxon and a bit of spare-time Chaucer reading, and as long as they avoid references to Rome, I can do the eighteenth century folks. I'm not half bad at Shakespeare, either, courtesy of the Twenty-Pound Red Book of All Shakespeare from Exeter, and I can take a better-than-average stab at his contemporaries.

...I'm so jinxed myself into getting the hardest test ever next month. Crap.

Comments

[vbrooksutk.livejournal.com]

as far as the verbal GRE is concerned, I'm hopeless. But if you need any help with the quant portion, let me know - I somehow eked out a good score. :)

[icepixie]

Oh, I already took the regular GRE last summer in a fit of, "well, it's probably inevitable..." Did excellently on the writing, and pretty well on the verbal, although not as well as I did on the SAT. Did...not as well on the math, but not poorly enough that I'm going to spend the time/money to take it again. (Although I hear this fall, they're going back to having everyone do the same problems, instead of shunting you down to easier problems when you screw up, which would probably improve my scores. But...eh.)

I think the subject test is generally more heavily weighted than the general test by English grad programs, so I'm going to hope for the best on that one. :)

[spleeny.livejournal.com]

I just have to say, that's a wonderful subject title. Well punned.

[icepixie]

*bows*

[alto2.livejournal.com]

I consistently mixed up T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. I obviously need to look up both of them. Didn't one of them write the book Cats is based on...?

Good lord, yes, girl! Eliot penned Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, largely as fun little gifts for friends. They're fabulously witty and the rhymes he pulls off are pretty stunning. But if you want the really good stuff, you want "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," or "The Waste Land." Good, good stuff.

[icepixie]

Crap, I thought for sure TWL was Pound. Have read Prufrock, though, and knew it was Eliot.

Damn Modernists.

[alto2.livejournal.com]

Nope, they're all Eliot. Love him. :)