The last 24 hours of my life have been filled with forgetting. No, I did not have any unfortunate experiences at Sex Power God, nor did I accidentally walk into a men's bathroom. Rather, I had begun the mind purging process that is necessary after any exam that requires one to "study" by rote memorization. A few weeks' worth of cramming for the Graduate Record Exam (commonly, but not fondly, known as the GRE) finally served its purpose as I sat at a computer at a testing center in Warwick, and, after three grueling hours of typing and clicking, I was done.
Definitions for words such as "adumbrate," "badinage" and "chiaroscuro" began flying out of my head as soon as I stepped foot out of the testing center. As I stood in the windy cold for 20 minutes, waiting for the RIPTA to take me back to civilization, I tried to make myself forget about the less-than-ideal New England weather conditions by instead clearing all the GRE argot from my mind. When I did get onto the bus and began to thaw, however, I started ruminating on how useless an exam is if test-takers work harder to forget all the material post-exam than to study for it beforehand.
GRE General Test scores are required for applying to many postgraduate programs around the United States. The exam, in essence, is the SATs for grad school — standardized, computer-graded and costly. Even though admissions offices increasingly declare that they put less emphasis on applicants' GRE scores and more weight on other components of the application, there is still a considerable pressure to study extensively and score highly on the exam. As a recent victim of the unsavory experience of taking the GRE General Test (and the $160 registration fee), I would like to use my power as a columnist to highlight some of the fundamental flaws of this standardized test.
In order to work within the confines of the system to induce change, I shall proceed to construct this column to reflect the premises of my subject matter, and organize my argument into three main components — discussion of the Verbal, Mathematical and Analytical Writing sections of the GRE. Readers, you have the option to take a ten-minute break between the Verbal and the Math parts, but the column will proceed regardless of your attendance once the ten minutes are up.
As an international student, I often feel slighted with application forms asking me to provide proof that my English language skills are up to par with their expectations. The GRE Verbal syllabus looked down its nose at me from an even snobbier level — it dictated that I must learn a gargantuan number of obscure words that I am likely never to use again in order to be thought of as half-decent. If the goal of the Verbal section of the GRE is to gauge test-takers' grasp of the English language, I would think that a better measure would be the personal statement essays and writing samples that are already important parts of application processes for most programs. If the goal of the section is actually to get some sense that students have the ability to think logically, I would suggest that a better method is for admissions officers to simply interview applicants.
In defense of mathematics, I believe that every student with aspirations to commence graduate education, with the possibility of taking a position as a teaching assistant, should be adept at applying the basic principles of counting and numerical distribution for the purposes of grading papers and collating students' results. Instead, the Math section of the GRE prefers to ask test-takers to recall mathematical exercises from high school years. For students wishing to apply to math- and science-oriented programs, the exam is definitely too shallow. For students going into the humanities, it is absolutely useless.
While I do believe that ensuring that applicants to postgraduate programs can write with some degree of dexterity is a brilliant idea, the execution and the logistics of the Analytical Writing section are rather terrible. Students are asked to debate obscure and intangible topics in a very limited time, putting students who are unfamiliar with English proverbs and idioms — and slow typers — at serious disadvantage. Again, I would hope that admissions officers will regard my 2500 word personal statement and 20-page writing sample with more care than they would my GRE writing score.
The GRE has become redundant and burdensome to the application process for graduate school admissions. There are better, easier and more cost-efficient methods for assessing whether prospective students are of the right caliber for admission. As students progress toward postgraduate education, we individualize our areas of academic interest and expertise. Standardized testing, by nature, slows us down.
Sarah Yu '11 tried to sneak in some particularly poignant GRE vocabulary into this column, and invites anyone who can spot the words to reach her at xia (underscore) yu (at) brown.edu.
