higher verbal, drastically lower quantitative: rare?

[LennieB]

Hello all,

Last fall I took the GRE with only about a month of hectic prep-- I worked through the Princeton Review's Cracking the Verbal GRE and spent a grand total of two afternoons preparing for the Quant section with the general Cracking the GRE book. I should mention I was an English major in college and really stink at numbers, so to seriously prep for the Q section would have involved massive remediation stretching back to high-school level math on my part. I did not use the Barron's word list (again, not much time), and read only the sample essays in the Princeton book for my AW preparation.

the result: 700 Verbal, 460 Quantitative, 5.5 Analytical Writing.

So, acceptably high Verbal and Analytical scores, low Quant. But everywhere I look I see lower verbal section scores and 700-800Q's. What gives? I know they're scaled a bit differently, but I'm interested in finding people (like me!) who did surprisingly well on verbal considering how fantastically bad they did on Quant.

I wouldn't be surprised if these people were like me: humanities-esque peeps who are reading geeks, native speakers of English, etc., who would rather diagram a sentence than balance an equation. We're like the opposite of the math whizzes from foreign countries dealing with the annoyance of definitional nuances in obscure English vocab.

[Art Grad]

I can completely identify with this. On the SAT, I had a huge verbal score, but my math score was well below average. As an undergrad, I aced classes dealing with composition and verbal skills, but struggled with quantitative courses. I would rather do 3 hours of analogies and an essay, than an hour of math. I am registered to take the GRE for the first time in November, so I have studied like crazy for the quantitative section. I aced the verbal practice tests without even preparing, so I'm not even worrying about those. All my energies at this point are focused on getting a decent score on the quantitative. Of course, since the graduate program I'm trying to get into is Art Education, I'm hoping they won't penalize me too much for a mediocre quantitative score!

[Art Grad]

Update. I took the GRE today and received my unofficial scores: 600 V, 560 Q. I had actually expected to do better on the verbal and worse on the quantitative, so I was surprised on both counts. I have made my program's cutoff (arts), so I am done with this particular challenge.

[LennieB]

Congratulations! So good to get things done. Hope your program is awesome.

[satrianic]

660 quant 670 verbal
thats low considering the fact that i am engineer...
i think GRE quant has nothing to do with massive programming or advanced calculus....
i hate GRE