Having said that, it's really hard to assess whether or not there was anything more I *could* have done to prepare when I felt like I did so much to prepare in the first place; I definitely can say that I studied harder for the quantitative section than most people who score well on it. I know a number of people who graduated college when I did who are applying to general PA schools and other graduate programs that accept the GRE, and most of them didn't do anything more than briefly review math concepts on the internet one or two nights before the test... and yet all of them scored higher than the 70th percentile.
I think, therefore, that a better question to ask would be, would additional preparation have enabled me to score any higher than I did, considering that I already did so much more to prepare than most people do.
It is just surreal to think that I got this far, have a fairly high GPA (close to 3.6), did very well (mostly A's) in my upper-level biology courses, and have to accept the very real possibility that this one, single component will hold me back from pursuing this career.
The other person who posted brings up a good point, though; if CRNA programs, for the most part, accept people who have even lower GRE scores than what I have, how is it that they manage to graduate competent anesthesia providers? Why do the AA programs place such a heavy emphasis on evaluating applicants on the basis of their GRE scores when the majority of CRNA program matriculants have scores that apparently wouldn't even get them past the cut-offs that most AA programs implement?
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