GRE: General Rantings Exasperated

I recently started to prepare for the GRE exam. Ok not recently; that's a lie. Let's say, back-in-june-I-bought-a-book-but-really-haven't-opened-it recently. And even more recently I decided that I don't want to do it this year. I'm in no hurry to go to grad school, nor am I in a hurry to accumulate any more monetary debt. Thank you very much. Who said that grad school had to be completed two years after your undergraduate degree? MBAs don't function like that.

So, anyway, since I scrapped studying for the GRE, I started surfing other people's blogs instead, and I came across one by Paul Pehrson, a fellow blogger who enjoys tech writing. I thought I'd link parts of this because I found it humorous, especially it pretty much parallels my thoughts about standardized testing.

***************

As you probably know, students wishing to apply for graduate school must take a standardized test, the scores of which are sent to your choice of schools. Getting a high score on the standardized test facilitates entry into the grad school program of your choice.

The GRE is to Grad School as:

a. MCAT is to high school

b. SAT is to 4-year Universities

c. read is to aspirin

d. eat is to novel

This is a common type of question in the verbal section of the GRE exam. The correct answer is “b.” However, this type of question is really hard when the options given in C and D are the question. Example:

READ is to ASPIRIN as:

a. DOG is to TELEPHONE

b. HOUSE is to PERSON

c. GLOVE is to HAND

d. HAND is to GLOVE

e. none of the above

f. all of the above (including e)

g. answers A, and B but not C, and maybe D

h. who really cares?

When you answer this question, you think to yourself, I’d like to choose "h", but there isn’t a spot for "h" on my little bubble sheet. Besides, answer "h" doesn’t really exist. You just wish it did.

Then you examine the two initial words: READ and ASPIRIN. Nobody in their right mind can figure out what the relationship between READ and ASPIRIN is! And do you mean READ in the past tense, or READ in the present tense? It could be a past participle, however ASPIRIN is a noun. Usually verbs do things to nouns, but in this case, you don’t read an aspirin. Then you realize that you have spent four precious minutes analyzing the semantic meaning of the word aspirin in conjunction with the word read, and you mark “c” because that’s the default answer when you don’t have a clue. Some things never change.

Note 1: I'm not sure why the GRE gets a .org domain name. For the amount they charge for the test, I have a hard time believing that they aren't making money in this venture. They've bamboozled universities across the world into believing that you can't accept students for grad work unless they've paid hundreds of dollars to take a multiple choice test. Hmmmmm...