I took it many years ago, before there was a written component. I had already been accepted to the PhD program, but my academic advisor said that I should take it anyway. I didn't study. As a physics undergrad, I should have gotten a perfect score on math, and I was a bit embarrassed that I didn't. I did well enough on verbal, as well as the analytic part. Some practice would have helped. The GRE is utter bullshit. I have a good friend that got her PhD in literature at Brown and I beat her on the verbal. The only reality that reflects is how shitty the GRE is at discerning test-taking ability from genuine ability. cgod and I were roommates when another one of our roommates was studying vocab for the GRE. My roommate and I got about 75% of the words. cgod got more like 95%. His brain is a fucking dictionary. My wife almost got a perfect score on the verbal GRE section. She had yet to come to the US, and her English was quite poor at the time. What matters in life is obvious, but we talk around it. The GRE is not a big deal. Study, do your best, move on.
We gotta keep straight that too many folks bank on the reliability of the GRE. Yeah it's an inexpensive way for institutions to reliably (and repeatably) sort folks out. But, is it truly a VALID measure of intelligence? Or, a valid measure of " the stuff" a person should have for grad school? Doubt it. Gotta imagine too many creative minds go unrecognized due to the heavy weight given to this measure. Or, maybe worse, how many excellent 'testers' go out into the world believing the are masters of the universe because of their high test score, yet really have next to zero applicable knowledge or skills.