Physics GRE Discussion Forums

At the Nov 12 2011 sitting of the PGRE I witnessed a tragic and needlessly expensive event. A student actually waited until the last minute to transfer his answers to the answer sheet. Yep. I can hardly believe it. It says in the test instructions not to do it, and here is why case and point. Needless to say, he was not nearly finished transferring his answers to the sheet when it was time to collect the tests.

Perhaps if you are still at the point where you are so uncertain in your work that you look at your answer choices again before finally making a decision, you're better off giving 48 hours notice and getting half of the fee refunded.

that's what i did to save time. easier to circle the answers on the questions booklet and transfer them at the end, than to keep going back and forth. i also found about 5 mistakes in answers i was sure about. would've been a hassle erasing them, especially with the cheap ass red erasers on the pencils. seriously what is up with those erasers? why even bother putting them on the pencil since they're useless anyway? no, i take that back, they're not useless, they make things worse.

only sheep follow instructions anyway

negru wrote:that's what i did to save time. easier to circle the answers on the questions booklet and transfer them at the end, than to keep going back and forth. i also found about 5 mistakes in answers i was sure about. would've been a hassle erasing them, especially with the cheap ass red erasers on the pencils. seriously what is up with those erasers? why even bother putting them on the pencil since they're useless anyway? no, i take that back, they're not useless, they make things worse.

only sheep follow instructions anyway

I wasn't going to chime in on this one but I have to agree and express my unwavering hatred for those crappy wood pencils and their erasers from hell. You're absolutely right, they make it worse. It's almost like all they do is seal a big black smudge on the paper with a glaze of I don't know what. I cringed when I learn you couldn't use mechanical pencils. Simply because of those pencils I did a similar thing, except I just made sure to fill in my answers every 20 questions.

I guess if I'd thought of this sort of tactic I'd have considered it. The problem is that you have to rely on the people running the contest to provide you with a warning when you're down to the last 15 minutes.

When I took the test I had no clock, and I was unsure when the exam started so my wrist-watch didn't do me any good. The result was that I ran open loop, and just went through it as quick as seemed reasonable.

wavicle wrote:At the Nov 12 2011 sitting of the PGRE I witnessed a tragic and needlessly expensive event. A student actually waited until the last minute to transfer his answers to the answer sheet. Yep. I can hardly believe it. It says in the test instructions not to do it, and here is why case and point. Needless to say, he was not nearly finished transferring his answers to the sheet when it was time to collect the tests.

Perhaps if you are still at the point where you are so uncertain in your work that you look at your answer choices again before finally making a decision, you're better off giving 48 hours notice and getting half of the fee refunded.

I strongly believe that this kind of thing makes scary part scarier.