GRE in The Wanderer

I’ve been studying for this test for about a year, making the past few months crunch time. I cannot afford a tutor, and my school does not offer any prep classes, so I basically had to learn everything on my own. This included checking out and reading all the GRE books they offered at my library and watching a lot of you tube videos, taking a lot of practice exams, and learning a lot of vocab words. I feel like the only thing my time was spent well on was learning the format of the GRE and knowing exactly how the test was going to be. It took me four hours to get through the thing, but I’ve been practicing for so long the time went by fast. While I was taking it, I honestly felt like I was doing very good in the math section. I would spend no more than 2 minutes per problem since you don’t have much more time than that to spend on them, and the answer I would get was always an answer choice so I felt it was going well. The vocab tripped me up. (Of course all those new words I memorized was no where on the test). I thought for sure I was actually doing better in the math section. Well at the very end of the test your score pops up and there were two horrible numbers. Verbal: 152 Quant: 144. Average is 150. I got below average for the math and looked it up only to realize I had fallen in the 18th percentile!! Ugh!!!! How can I be so bad at math, especially when I honestly felt I was doing it right!??! Next time, I need to just choose an answer that ISN’T the answer I got after doing the problems. I looked up the average GRE scores that Duq accepts, and I was way below. I need a 162 V and 152 Q to be able to compete with the other applicants. I have two choices at this point: Study more and try again or stick with the score I got and hope the rest of my application is good enough to be considered for an interview. I am most likely going to re-take it because I don’t have anything to lose (well besides another $200 bucks) and if I get better scores, I can choose to have the good scores sent over instead of these crappy ones. I have to wait two weeks to see what I got on my essay portion. I need at least a 4 so my total score will be 300 and that is the cutoff score for my application to even be looked at! Aghhh, so stressful. All because of the stupid GRE–a test that is designed to show schools how well you will do in their program, but in actuality is a test that makes ETS tons of money and has nothing to do with how well a student will do in grad school.