Kate Stuller
It’s been a week since that dreaded day I woke up at 6 a.m. and dragged my hopeless soul to the Shoemaker Building, where I sat and stared at a computer screen for four hours, scanning through some of the most poorly worded multiple-choice questions I had ever read.
I wish I could give at least one honest example of how utterly idiotic some of the reading comprehension passages were, but I signed a form agreeing that if I ever revealed any of the information on the exam, my scores would be erased forever, and the GRE demons would find me and make sure I never get into any graduate program for as long as I live.
(God forbid they prevent me from going to graduate school, and I’m forced to do that absurd thing called Face Reality, Apply for a Job and Become a Productive Member of Society Instead of Using Another Five Years of Education as an Escape Route.)
But nonetheless, I do not need to enclose a sample question in order to convey how the GRE exam is, without a doubt, four hours of my life that I will never get back.
The test isn’t simply poorly written — it devalues the entire point of a college education.
We attend college for specialization. That is how society works. Would it be nice to quadruple major in English, music, engineering and mathematics? Of course. But our education system does not support such aspirations. The GRE, however, thinks it does.
The last time I took a math class was senior year of high school. I signed up for AP Calculus simply because a 4 or 5 on the exam meant I would never have to take math again for the rest of my life. Yay!
And yet, years later, after all that clever planning and hard work, I take the GRE exam and see a math question that requires me to know the formula for an equilateral triangle. Something with base and height? No, it involves the square root of three. Silly me. How could I forget? It’s only been seven years since I took trigonometry.
Likewise, I cannot imagine how anyone who is not an English major could survive the verbal section of the exam. All I do is read, and I still haven’t heard of about 70 percent of those words. Why would a biology or architecture major ever be expected to use the words “grandiloquence” or “vituperate?”
No one talks like that today. And if you do, you’re probably a pretentious asshole. Sorry.
The point of graduate school is to enhance your understanding of something that inspires you. It is to make you a master of something that you are truly passionate about — something you want to spend the rest of your life studying. How does an essay question about, let’s say, the spreading epidemic of toe warts on a college campus help an electrical engineer prove to an admissions board that they have truly mastered their undergraduate curriculum and research program? How does a math problem about the area of a potato chip bag prove to graduate admissions counselors that I have certainly spent a respectable amount of time understanding the historical significance of British literature?
The GRE tests nothing, other than your ability to buy a $40 book, read it, do a few practice tests and correctly fill in your credit card number for the whopping $195 test fee. Worth it? Absolutely not.
Therefore, do not fear it. If you have to take the exam (ugh, damn those requirements) and have yet to take it, here’s my advice: Do not waste time fretting over all the wrong answers that the answer key in the back of your practice book is rubbing in your face. The people who wrote the exam probably haven’t published a real thing in their life — whether that’s scientific or mathematical research, or a literary publication. And if they have, it probably sucked, so they spend their lonesome hours writing an exam that will crush the spirits of hopeful young intellectuals to make themselves feel better for being so basic and unsuccessful in their youths.
And if your program expects you to be in the 95th percentile, well then, what kind of program are you really applying to? Are they saying that simply as a form of intimidation or do they really expect their applicants to spend their undergraduate years balancing four majors in order to pass a single exam?
Have hope, my friends. A graduate school application relies on your personal statement, written samples or research projects, and letters of recommendation — three things that truly prove you have committed to a subject that inspires you to further your education and understand your interests in their deepest sense. We’re better than a standardized test.
