Looks like I had the same test as kstreet and student1184. Although, no sonic the hedgehog (eh?).
PS: The first half was pretty easy chemistry stuff. I was thinking, "hey, this isn't so bad, I'm going to do MUCH better than I usually do in PS - maybe I'll even get an 11 or 12!" (I always got either an 8 or 10 on PS in practice tests). Then the second half was mostly physics, but were REALLY rough physics passages. I don't feel that I could have prepared better for it - it was just nasty. I spoke to a bunch of people at my testing center, and they all had the same impression, so I'm hoping there will be a decent curve for PS. The calculations weren't as bad as I had feared (I HATE math), but the physics was more difficult than I expected. And some odd wave-aspect questions that I thought were odd and/or applied to areas of physics other than waves. The roller coaster question about velocity seemed like something I should have been able to calculate, but I simply couldn't get it to work. So odd. I'd say that question annoyed me more than any other question in that section, simply because I felt like I *should* have been able to do it, but couldn't figure out how. Oh, and I swear, there was a chem question about the empirical formula/relationship between two elements that I'm positive was a discrete from a recent practice test I took (CBT 8?). That was a nice surprise. Altogether, I finished with about 5 minutes to spare. I felt pretty destroyed after PS.
VR: I thought it was pretty representative of the CBTs, but the passages definitely were longer than on the CBTs. I only ever ran out of time on two practices, but because of that I made sure I booked it and kept at a good clip. I finished with about 7 minutes to spare, and spent about 5 of them puzzling over the robot number of devices question. Eh? So annoying. The song birds were irritating, but overall it could have been worse. I also had the productivity/economics passage, the art/camera obscura passage, and the Descartes passage. Nothing like that nasty Picasso passage from CBT 5 that I feared. Oh, and of course, everyone around me was pounding on their keyboards during my VR section. That sucked. Even the headphones couldn't drown that out. Meh.
WS: Never practiced this, and didn't feel I need to. The prompts were easy, and luckily did not make me have to "create" a politician to talk about. That was my only concern on this section. I hope they don't dock me too much for only having four paragraphs per essay. Did they want the standard five? If so, so be it. I don't like rules. Also, I only spent 15 minutes per essay. I so just wanted to get out of there. I had to wait an hour just for them to seat me at the testing center, so I was pretty impatient to be done with it by then.
BS: I'm a bit scared that this section seemed easier than any of the CBTs. I figure that will mean that there won't be much of a curve. The orgo wasn't as bad as some of the orgo in some of the more recent CBTs. I think I had three orgo passages. I remember a passage about ways to distinguish ketones from aldehydes experimentally, a Grignard reaction, and the differences between various purification methods. However, there was an HNMR proton question that I swear they screwed up. There was simply no "CDCl3" anywhere in the passage, but they referred to it in the question. I spent a few minutes puzzling about that one. I wrote that up in my "survey," so maybe they'll look into it. I also had the goats, plasmids, calcium regulation, ADH/aldosterone regulation, etc. Lots of physiology and hormones, I thought. But hey, that's fine by me. I was happy we didn't get any tough molecular bio or complex genetics. Come to think of it, I don't think there was a single question on glycolysis, krebs, etc. The question that I hated the most (and totally screwed up) was a Hardy-Weinberg theorem discrete. I knew the formula, but just couldn't get it to work. And I guessed what the answer probably would be, but of course changed my answer to a wrong answer. Argh. I swore I'd go with my gut, but forgot to do so on the last question of the test. And, as with my practices, I finished BS with about 15 minutes to spare.
Ok, now is the tough part - waiting for July 18th. I'm going to hope that I got at least a 9 on PS. I'm going to guess I got an 11-12 on VR, and an 11 on BS (unless it was so easy that there was NO curve, in which case I got a 10). So, I figure I got between a 30 and a 32, which is what I predicted going into the test. Just crossing my fingers I didn't bomb the PS section and get a 7 or 8 on it.
Congrats to everyone on finishing and getting this over with. Now we can actually enjoy some of the summer festivities. And try our best to forget about this fiasco until July 18th.
Oh, one last thing. Cracked me up that the proctor at the end said to each of us as we signed out, "See you in a few years for Step 1!"