Tooting my own horn.

I got my official GRE scores in the mail yesterday (which included my not-yet-revealed analytical writing scores). The writing score was the only thing I didn't know, so as I tore into the envelope I thought about all I'd read...the writing pieces are scored by three official readers (mostly college professors) and graded by the half point between 0 and 6. You are given the mean score of the three scores and it is rounded to the nearest .5 point. The average writing score for the GRE population is 4.1. Anything above a 5 is hard to get. I got a 5.5. I was astounded and delighted. The official ETS testing site (people that administer the test) says:

Score Levels 6 and 5.5
Sustains insightful, in-depth analysis of complex ideas; develops and supports main points with logically compelling reasons and/or highly persuasive examples; is well focused and well organized; skillfully uses sentence variety and precise vocabulary to convey meaning effectively; demonstrates superior facility with sentence structure and language usage but may have minor errors that do not interfere with meaning.

As I said to my mother after I gleefully revealed my score to her last night, "if I'd known I could do this well on the GRE I would have gone to Grad school for something really hard years ago." Ha.