I took it back in September and never want to go through that experience again. People asked me if I remembered any details about the test questions. I usually reply that I don’t remember any details about how I got home that night. There was a train, and I think my wife picked me up somewhere, but that’s about all I remember through the fried haze. I overclocked my medulla oblongata that day.
Still, while I agree that the test as a whole doesn’t measure academic success , it wasn’t totally useless. I learned how to figure out the meaning of words by their roots, and IMHO, everyone should know how to work math problems at the GRE general test level. There’s no calc or trig involved. It’s all arithmetic, geometry, and basic algebra, and studying for the test really does improve your abstract problem solving skills. Between learning the meanings of words such as “antediluvian” and “mendicant” and relearning how to work those fucking train problems, I’d chalk the whole thing up to a good review of stuff I didn’t master in high school.
As soon as I found out I beat the mean, I put the GRE test itself out of my mind. I don’t know my percentiles, and I can’t say as I really give a damn. It’s done, and hopefully I’ll be in grad school by the end of next month. Just one more means to an end in my life.
I argue that it’s their felching job to know how to evaluate an academic record, it’s pure laziness if they can’t substantively compare an applicant’s record from City University of Fresno to one from Purdue. That is why accreditation bodies exist, so that an educational baseline and standard can be used. Otherwise, one also has plenty of letters of recommendation, application essays, internships, and other items to evaluate a potential student. A standardized test that demonstrates nothing about one’s ability to learn, manage workload, study, dedicate themselves, or academically perform, is lazy administrative wankery.
Accreditation is binary - a school is either accredited or not. It doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the instruction or the student, and grad schools aren’t interested in students who’ve achieved an “educational baseline and standard.” Letters of recommendation are good, but you’re a sad sack if you can’t find three people to vouch for you, and my personal statement for my last grad school application was two pages - how much could you tell about my intelligence, academic drive, and work ethic from 6 or 7 paragraphs?
You’re right that it’s easy enough to differentiate between the City University of Fresno and Purdue, sure, but is a student with a 3.7 GPA from the (fully accredited) College of Jim White more or less impressive than the student with a 3.4 from (the fully accredited) James L. White University? How is the admissions officer supposed to know that of the upper level classes in the Jim White Impressive Stuff Department, ISD 425 (“Really Impressive Stuff”) has a reputation as an easy A, but ISD 410 (“Less Impressive Stuff”) is a killer class taken only by the top students? Like it or not, it’s the job of the applicant to convince the school that they’re qualified, and the GRE is part of that. Part of managing your workload and dedicating yourself is doing shit you have to do, and the GRE is right up at the top of that list for grad school applicants.
Potential grad students should get used to jumping through hoops. You’ll be doing a lot of it, and it goes a whole lot easier if you just suck it up and get the shit out of the way so you can get on with the stuff you really want to do (says the guy who just had to reapply to the same grad school he’s already enrolled in to advance from an MS to a PhD program that’s already fully funded from an external source).
I spent the afternoon going through a practice test using the PowerPrep software. This was just a preliminary to get a feel for it.
I ended up with a 690 for verbal and 510 for quantitative. I’m OK with the verbal, but I need a LOT of work on the quantitative. It’s been too damn long since I’ve had a math class.
I don’t think the PowerPrep software adjusts for your answers - it just has its set questions. In my case, this made a pretty significant difference. I was getting really terrible scores on the math with the PowerPrep software, stuff like 470, and on the way to the test center I was writing a letter in my head to the schools I was applying to, trying to explain that I’m really not stupid, just lousy at math. I ended up getting a 600, which IMO is perfectly decent for someone not planning on being an engineer or whatever. (Plus, I totally rocked the verbal section. Yay me, I can’t add, but I have a large vocabulary.)
There is actually very little math in the quantitative portion. If you know a few basic rules, that is enough. What trips people up is that the questions actually test critical reasoning much more than actual math skills. If you can take a percent, are comfortable with fractions, and know how and when to apply the Pythagorean theorem, that is already half the battle.
I still argue that it is their job to know. There are these nifty developments called communications, peer reviews, journals, media, networking with collegues, databases, personal interviews, surveys, that all can enable someone to filter out a Rolling Stone diploma mill from a quality challenging program. If one only needs the GRE to assuage the ignorance of the admissions reviewer, then just make it optional for those tiebreaker situations when the admissions reviewer can’t be bothered to type g-o-o-g-l-e.