GRE

Katie D.

February 26, 2010 - 5:40 PM

I've done it! Taken the dreaded GRE, the Graduate Record Examinations, the gateway test to grad school.

I hate standardized tests. Though to be honest, I used to love them. Taking those annoying tests back in elementary school meant filling in a bunch of bubbles with a blunt Number 2 pencil and then sitting back to read a novel. I was a fast reader then, as I am now, and back then I was also good at math. Those test days had extra recess time and a chance to take a break from normal classes. We sat in different desks, had friends around to make faces at, and had only the vaguest understanding of why we were taking the tests in the first place. My mom always looked forward to the test scores, but I never even quite noticed. It was just a break in the normal school year.

Oh my, how things have changed.

I just left my GRE. Three hours in a little cubicle desk in a white room with seven other cubicle desks, facing computer screens and constantly surveyed by video cameras mounted on the ceiling. No ambient noise except for keyboard typing and my neighbor in the next cubicle who incessantly tapped his pencil against the desk. Noise canceling headphones can only do so much.

I haven't taken a standardized test since the SAT. I honestly haven't taken a test of any kind for more than a year. The reality of a literature major's college experience is not exactly one of multiple-choice knowledge. Rather, the skill set I have developed in college is one of argumentation and idea development. A Number 2 pencil hasn't figured significantly in my grades since freshman year. Finals aren't a time of stressed-out cramming for me, rather a time of stressed-out essay writing. So being in a testing center at all was stressful.

There are three sections of the basic GRE. The first is the writing section, with an opinion essay followed by an analytical piece. I honestly enjoyed that part of the test. I just sat there, typing away, not unlike I do while writing these weekly blogs. The style was different, but the basic act of writing was basically the same.

Next was the verbal portion. That's the part my science major friends worry about. It's the part people practice with the flashcards for words like "peregrinate" (Nerd alert! I already knew that one). You fill in the blanks of poorly-written sentences with appropriate missing words. You find antonyms and you do analogies (I hate this part). You also answer multiple-choice questions about passages of text.

Then came the math. The dreaded, horrible math section. The place where words give way to strange-looking combinations of letters and numbers combined to taunt you with questions of the areas of triangles or the absolute value of x. Oh, friends and readers, this section was grim. I knew it would be. I am in this circumstance the stereotypical literature student. I see numbers and I want to run screaming. The timer clicked away and I struggled through basic algebra, geometry, and weird word programs. The graphs and probability/statistics questions were great-I can see the value in that kind of math, and generally understand it pretty well. But good grief, show me a rectangle with a triangle inside it and ask me the length of the hypotenuse? Forget about it. Not to mention the extreme frustration of having memorized the quadratic equation and not being called upon to use it. So I'll use it here. Ready? OK. X equals negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c all divided by two a.

I can't get the darn thing out of my head now.

Well, enough crankiness from me. The GRE is behind me, and good riddance. You get your scores right away, and I did well on the verbal portion, and managed to score better than I had imagined on the math portion. Hopefully it's enough to get me into the graduate program of my dreams, the Conflict Resolution Master's program here at the UO. They don't prioritize the GRE scores, which is a good sign for me.

That might have been the final standardized test in my lifetime. One can only hope. I hope that sitting through the description wasn't as painful for you as sitting through the test was for me.

And even if nothing comes of it, at least the "forces that be" have managed to teach this excessively verbal type one tiny math tool: the Quadratic Equation. X equals negative b plus or minus...

I'll be having nightmares about that one for weeks to come.