View Poll Results: What was your scaled score?

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  • 850 <= score < infinity

    1 20.00%
  • 800 <= score < 850

    1 20.00%
  • 750 <= score < 800

    1 20.00%
  • 700 <= score < 750

    1 20.00%
  • 650 <= score < 700

    1 20.00%
  • 600 <= score < 650

    0 0%
  • 550 <= score < 600

    0 0%
  • 500 <= score < 550

    0 0%

Thread: Computer Science GRE subject exam

  1. #1
    l'Anziano DavidP's Avatar
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    Computer Science GRE subject exam

    A practice exam can be found here:

    http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/CompSci.pdf

    Instructions:
    1. Don't study! Take the exam immediately (or whenever possible).
    2. Report your I-took-the-practice-CompSci-GRE-without-studying score on here

    Me:

    Correct: 38
    Incorrect: 32
    Scaled score: 740

    I should have skipped a lot of the questions I knew I didn't know, but I wanted to give an honest effort to each question...so I answered all of them. To be fair, if I had skipped questions that I knowingly didn't know (does that make sense?), I could have pushed myself up in the rankings a bit. Still...not bad for not studying? It kicked my trash...
    Last edited by DavidP; 04-07-2010 at 09:16 PM.
    My Website

    "Circular logic is good because it is."

  2. #2
    Ecologist
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    Do you still go to BYU?
    Staying away from General.

  3. #3
    and the Hat of Guessing tabstop's Avatar
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    Not sure how you got the answers to the five ** questions. I also answered the ones I would have normally skipped (I know nothing about grammars) just for fun, and apparently I started to fall apart around question 50. Anyway +47 -18 which apparently scales to 820. Not bad for a stinking mathematician. [If you let me skip, it ends up being +44 -9 =12, which gets me the exact same 820. Hooray guessing!]
    Last edited by tabstop; 04-07-2010 at 10:31 PM.

  4. #4
    l'Anziano DavidP's Avatar
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    Ooooh yeah there were 5 questions not graded. Oops I need to go back and rework my score, haha.

    ethic: no, i graduated about a year ago. my actual reason for posting this is because i'm looking at grad schools, and i need to get back in the books and study in order to take the GRE.
    My Website

    "Circular logic is good because it is."

  5. #5
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    I got too bored with it after 2 questions, but I got both of them right. So I guess my score was 100% :P.
    Yes, the first two *were* painfully easy.

  6. #6
    Woof, woof! zacs7's Avatar
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    Sigh, CS! Glad I chose Software Engineering

    Honestly, I don't know why they keep mentioning bubble sort in CS. Seriously. Many of those questions are painfully obvious, many are mindless regurgitation, and some are challenging!
    Last edited by zacs7; 04-08-2010 at 03:15 AM.

  7. #7
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Downloaded. Should be fun to see what a non graduate can do with it.
    But I'll need some free time. I'll try this later.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  8. #8
    Crazy Fool Perspective's Avatar
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    Dude that thing is like 50 pages... I'll just assume I'm somewhere around infinity.

  9. #9
    l'Anziano DavidP's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by EVOEx View Post
    I got too bored with it after 2 questions, but I got both of them right. So I guess my score was 100% :P.
    Yes, the first two *were* painfully easy.
    Quote Originally Posted by zacs7 View Post
    Sigh, CS! Glad I chose Software Engineering

    Honestly, I don't know why they keep mentioning bubble sort in CS. Seriously. Many of those questions are painfully obvious, many are mindless regurgitation, and some are challenging!
    As I took the exam I noticed that the questions get progressively harder. The first 35 questions were definitely much easier for me than the last 35 questions. I don't know if it's a function of me getting tired because of the length of the exam, or if the last 35 questions were legitimately more challenging.

    Regardless, there were some concepts on the exam that were never covered in a single one of my CS classes I took (such as the intricate details of the TCP/IP stack. Sure...there was an elective course I could have taken to learn those things, but it wasn't part of the core curriculum). There were other concepts that I learned, but have since forgotten about or need to brush up on because it's been a long time (Turing machines, finite automata, languages/grammars/alphabets/stuff i don't really care about). Finally, stuff I actually care about was rarely covered (AI, machine learning, etc).

    I got lucky with some of the questions: some of them asked for details about caching, pipelining, and RISC instruction sets. Although several courses go over caching, only one course at my university really went in depth about pipelining and RISC instruction sets, and it's not a required course...luckily I took the course
    My Website

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  10. #10
    Ecologist
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    Quote Originally Posted by DavidP View Post
    ethic: no, i graduated about a year ago. my actual reason for posting this is because i'm looking at grad schools, and i need to get back in the books and study in order to take the GRE.
    You should come to the U. We're a better school than BYU. I'm
    pretty popular on campus, too. I can hook you up with some
    friends.
    Staying away from General.

  11. #11
    l'Anziano DavidP's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ethic View Post
    You should come to the U. We're a better school than BYU. I'm
    pretty popular on campus, too. I can hook you up with some
    friends.
    The U is actually in my list of options at the current time...but then again, I have a very large list of schools I am looking at and trying to pair it down a bit. We'll see
    My Website

    "Circular logic is good because it is."

  12. #12
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Ugh!

    24 right
    8 wrong
    38 Unanswered
    ---------
    Raw Score: 22
    Scaled Score: 680
    ---------

    There goes my chance at being admitted this year.

    Fun test. Learned a lot about what I don't know. And some questions were actually quite interesting. One issue though: How on earth does the loop terminate in question 15?
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  13. #13
    l'Anziano DavidP's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F. View Post
    Ugh!

    24 right
    8 wrong
    38 Unanswered
    ---------
    Raw Score: 22
    Scaled Score: 680
    ---------

    There goes my chance at being admitted this year.

    Fun test. Learned a lot about what I don't know. And some questions were actually quite interesting. One issue though: How on earth does the loop terminate in question 15?
    I guessed on question 15 And I think I got it wrong...

    Two things I had never even heard of before taking this exam: datagrams (which apparently after reading on wikipedia are just equivalent to packets) and loop invariants (which I still don't understand even after reading wikipedia).
    My Website

    "Circular logic is good because it is."

  14. #14
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    Well... I just wasted 2 hours of my employer's time on that. I'm surprised by both how much I remember and how much I forgot in the last 10-15 years. I got tired towards the second half of it as well (and it didn't help that my wife was skyping me for the last hour distracting me with questions about our daughters' birthday presents). Still pretty interesting to see a lot of those concepts again.

  15. #15
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Yeah. That article is a little to the insane.

    Think of a the loop invariant as any condition that must remain true on entry and during all iterations of the loops. I find it easier to think of a loop knowing the invariant than finding the invariant in a given loop.

    Say you need to loop through all positive integers less than 100 that are even. One loop invariant is x % 2 = 0.
    It's not very clear to me if a loop can have more than one invariant, of if the invariant is the full logical statement. In that last case, it would need to be x < 100 && x % 2 = 0
    Last edited by Mario F.; 04-08-2010 at 04:42 PM. Reason: "than", not "then"!
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

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