Nov. 13 PGRE - How did it go?

So, it's over now and for most of us, this was our last attempt at taking this thing before applications are due. How did it go for everyone else? I feel like I did much better than the first go round, answering 76 questions. I feel like the test was a little easier than April, then again I was much better prepared. Hoping for a score of 800, be happy with 700 and above. Will a raw score of 60 get an 800? What do you think is the scaled score this go round from those of you who took it will be?

I felt pretty good about it. I answered all of the questions but one. I thought it was ridiculously easy though so I think there will be a pretty rough curve. It was way easier than any of the practice tests they put out.

First time to take PGRE, It turned out to be much easier than the 4 practice tests indeed.. So, I am sure getting a high score would be very competitive.. For example, I made at least one mistake in one of the very first easy questions.. that would directly put me in a bad position since all people will get that right.

Overall, The test was not representing physics well.. It focused on few concepts and kept repeating same concepts in different questions !! that was really intriguing, happened in relativity and in E&M.. very few thermo & statistical questions and a lottttt of particle stuff.. ( not sure if saying that violates ets rules of not publishing test materials )

I attempted 95 questions, around 10 of them were educated guesses..

P.S. It would be nice to edit the thread to contain a poll so that people can say how many questions they attempted ( a poll with options like *above 90 * from 80 to 90 ...etc)

Moral of the story, this test SUCKS !

I attempted 82 questions with no guess. That's my first test. It was not so hard but i got stuck on some questions and i lost time =(. I don't know how it will be. I hope for an 800+ but i know it will be very hard..

I didn't count how many questions I attempted, but I think it was in the 90s. I guessed on a lot, possibly 15-20. Overall I think it was an easy test. Some questions seemed absurdly easy, so it's hard to tell if I got them right or not without missing something. Others are deceptive and thinking back I realized I did the problem wrong. E&M and Mechanics were very straightforward. Advanced topics and quantum were not.

Seems like ETS changed gear from positronium to certain other-nium I was a bit upset that even though I have about 20 minutes left when I got to question 100, I did not manage the leftover time well and did not go over all the questions that I marked as "look over and answer later" - thus leaving a few blanks that I should have at least guessed on (most of them I already eliminated 2 or 3 choices, or know how to do but just skipped them for time's sake). Maybe left about 7 or 8 blanks, know already that I got at least 2 wrong (of the one that I answered). I thought the test is a little harder than the Oct one; the quantum questions are definitely harder. Hoping for 900+ (and a forgiving curve).


A certain integral (at least in my way of approaching the questions) showed up at least 3 times, and I wasn't sure about the value (short of evaluating it). It's a fairly common integral, true, but still!!! There is also two questions back-to-back where the second question gives really decent hint about the first one. Ha!

The curve will be fairly harsh in comparison to 0177, like all the tests have been previously. I answered 97 Questions. However, I do not feel confident. I would say approximately 20 of them were guesses (between ~3 different answers). I'm hoping for a Raw Score of around an 80, which I hope will translate to at least an 800. Even with this, I do feel there is a chance I could have gotten as low as a 70, or as high as an 85.

-Riley

If raw score of 80 does not mean 800+, that'd be sad. It is a nice looking 950 in the 01 test.

I don't think that would be the case, in Oct test, which was similar I guess, there was someone who got 990 with 90 raw score.. so even if each point in one's raw score counts for 10 in the scaled score, 80 would be 890.. At least I hope so

And about the integrals, I didn't have to use integrals in the exam except for one problem.. So, I am not really sure what you r talking about, unless u were deriving some E&M famous results from scratch

I thought it was pretty easy, but I definitely spent to long on some of the trickier ones. I ended up answering about 86 of them, with 10 being educated guesses between 2 or 3 answers. I know for a fact I made at least one VERY dumb mistake (a silly math error), so I'm hoping I didn't do that in any other places. My strategy was just take as much time as needed to answer the questions and not skip around much -- so I didn't even get to attempt the last 5 questions... although I know I could have done at least the 2 of them that I looked at >.<

Overall, I wish I paced myself better and skipped the one or two problems that took me a long time. I'm expecting around 70 to 80 raw score range -- and hoping the curve will bring that above an 800 (although I don't think the curve will be very forgiving).

Also, I only ended up having to do one integral on the test as well - not sure where the repeated integral would have come in other than deriving a formula.

I thought it was a bit difficult. Harder than 0177 in my opinion, kinda sad to see most other people thought it was easy. It was cake up until I finished the first half. I went into super saiyen mode at the last 10 minutes or something, because I went over like 10 of the questions I skipped and nailed them. At the end, I left 14 blank, 10 of them harsh guess, another 10 pretty confident guesses. I scored an 820 on the last practice test, but I felt like I did horribly on that while taking it and it ended up being my best score. I sort of felt the same way about this one too. We'll see.

I thought the test went overboard on the thermo...

Is this sarcasm? I felt there was less thermo on it than the practice tests, but maybe I just wasn't paying much attention. No partition function questions made me sad =(

did anyone get that dopper sound prob? I had v=11c, which wasn't a choice but was the inverse of a choice, so I just left it blank

No...I took all 4 practice tests and thought this test had a lot more thermo than those, personally.

U certainly didn't make it to the last question

But, yeah. There were almost no statistical stuff at all.. bad after that much of preparation

What about the question where there were two kids fighting and one threw a rock at the back of the other ones head?

-Riley

I don't know man. I think ETS screwed that up because I got the same exact thing. Yup, 11 times the speed of light.

not an easy one... I knew that preparing for a week is not good enough but still... got around 60 questions. I think the EM wasn't nice... well I definitely underestimated the test :/ Still hope that being a woman from eastern europe will help (sad but... well wanna get out of here)

I meant c=speed of sound

Nop. It had a solution that was in the answers, I don't remember the exact thing though

There were quite a bit of thermal questions, I thought, just not a lots of stat mech question - thermo/stat mech are not quite the same thing, even if they are almost always taught in the same course, for good reasons.

Surprisingly, I managed to regurgitate 90 out of 100 questions in the past few hours on a paper for bookkeeping - many just vaguely on what the question is. Hopefully it's because the other 10 are so easy that I simply cannot recall them. I did not answer 4; 6 are definitely wrong; 3-4 I'm not too sure. Barring stupid errors, I'm looking at raw score of around 85. Hopefully that's enough to keep me around the middle part of 900. :Finger crossed:

For those of you who think it was harder, in comparison to the last two tests I've taken, it was a little tougher. However, the first half of the test was pretty easy for me. At about question 70, I hit a few that I struggled with.

Although I will not comment about the question in particular, the question you guys are mentioning did have a solution and it was a choice.

-Riley

Oct. Test was also easy.
So was last year's test.

This one seems roughly the same.
So 88-90 raw score will probably translate to 990.
People make more stupid mistakes than you can imagine. So the curve won't be that bad.

I will try to update my raw score-scaled score correspondence on Oct. test when I get it.

I felt the test was pretty easy, easier than the practice tests. I made a few silly error on questions that I should have gotten.

Why are we all so scared about saying what the questions were? Personally, my thought is screw ETS. It's us against them.

There definitely was more Thermo/Stat Mech on this test than many practice ones. I can remember 3-4 questions Involving P-V diagrams, one or two with entropy/multiplicity, one with the RMS velocity, and a couple blackbody radiation.

I was pleased with the relative lack of advanced topics questions. There was some particle physics and 1 laser question and that was about it. The quantum had a few questions that were elementary if you're familiar with perturbation theory but would be hard if you haven't really seen it.

I thought there was way too many EM questions :/

I'm staying on ETS's side. They control my score. =P

-Riley

I thought the rock is going at a speed 8/3c (c = speed of light, of course), and the kid, because of conservation of momentum, is going 5/3c the other way. But it isn't one of the answer choices I hope this question does not bring my score below 900.

EDIT: Certain volume of blood is going along the direction of the kid, in case you wonder why momentum is not conserved in my answer.. .

Rather poorly for me I think due to time constraints reducing my effective study time to a week (finishing up my MS Thesis); though that's just me trying to make up excuses. Hopefully I didn't bomb it too bad, only 65 answered though I'm fairly confident about most of them.

Same here, though not that confident

The quantum seemed a bit tougher than I expected after taking october exam. But that might be just because I havent finished a course in QM yet

Same here. It was harder than the October test, except for mechanics. I think mechanics problems were easier this time.

Mixed views on test difficulty leaves me wondering whether the test was different for different groups of people. It is a known fact that there are 3 or more "forms" of the same test but until now, i thought they were just the same thing with questions arranged differently. However, one thing i read here heightens my suspicions. I do not remember reading the question about two boys with one of them throwing a rock at the other. And i did traverse the entire 100, attempting 82. My test paper had a copyright year of 2005 as well - a clue maybe?

Anyway, personally i felt the test was a tad less easier than the practice test. and i am not very uncomfortable with ETS idea of designing a test that tests how fast you are and not necessarily how intelligent you are. I dont think it matters much if you are able to solve a problem in 5 minutes or in just 2.5. I suppose they should go back to the earlier versions such as 8677, 9277 which were really a test of how solid one's understanding of physics is and how sharp one's analytical skills, in contrast to how quickly you can substitute and calculate. Its like the fastest horse alone wins here.

You'd do better not to trust everything you read on the internet

Especially anything I've said.

-Riley

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I felt the exam was disturbingly simple. Maybe I missed something. Attempted 88 questions with a couple of guesses. Hoping for 800 at least.

He was joking Of course ETS will not test us on a two boy fight

As for the exams, No, I think they are all the same. Mine had a copyright year of 2005 too. Did u have a question about logic gates?

Hey sleuths, no need to wonder. It's been verified in years past that on the same test dates, different forms have at least some different questions on them. Easy or hard, your percentile shouldn't change by much. Remember if it was easier for you, it was probably easier for everyone else.

idd the test was easy.
managed to solve 90sh questions in 2 hours.
there were less plug n chug problems
but more definition problems.
expecting a 800-850.
i hope ill be gone from this forsaken lands.
ppl here mock me cuz physicists cant make money.
they say we are the great bums of the future.
so i screewed the ets and them.
im bloody happy.

I answered 88 questions. 3 wild guesses! A 900+ maybe..

To those who took both the Oct and Nov tests? How do they compare? Which felt easier? It appears that a raw score of 88 = 990 for the October test? Any guesses on what it would be for this one?

.

I called, but they informed me that I was too awesome to have my score yet. =(

-Riley

I'm ashamed to say that I called today too. Nada - the nice lady on the phone said she found my record for the Nov test, but score is not yet available. I'll call a few more time before and on Saturday just to get my $12 worth of conversation time with that nice lady by the time I finally have pay and get the score.

Answered 94 [edit: I thought it was 97, but the report says I left 6 blank], about 15 I left for a second pass. Of those, I was pretty confident of 5, guessing between two for 5, and guessing a bit wildly between multiple answers for 2 more. The last 3 I had to leave blank even on the second pass.

I finished that second pass mere moments before time was called: I didn't bring a watch or phone & there was no clock on the room. The test proctors could have been much more helpful by marking time on the blackboard... At least they had pencils for those who brought mechanicals only. I had four Ticonderoga #2 pencils and they were all pretty dull by the end.

But as for time, I got up to stretch & visit the restroom at least two times, maybe three times. This test was an intense experience. Afterwards I stumbled around the campus, shaking a bit, until I found a Starbucks.

I have my scores now, but I'm a little bit afraid that I misheard the computer-phone-voice. They sounded good, though, and might help my paltry GPA and anemic research.

Well, the scores came in the mail today. Seems I heard right.