Officially getting GRE'd...before taking it.

Let's talk for a minute about Grad School. Or, more importantly, what I'm doing to get into Grad School. I've been reading through a GRE exam book, and slowly having confirmed what I've suspected all along:

• The GRE is not a good indication of how well you will do in Grad School.
• The GRE is not fair.
• The GRE is not a good test of your knowledge.

Most importantly, figuring out these facts have lead me to one simple conclusion:

• The GRE is a test of how well you can take the GRE.

This is why I'm spending my traveling hours on public transportation reading a GRE book that teaches me not new material, but specific techniques to be able to answer the questions.

I've been reading voraciously (a GRE word?) since I was a little thing, and I'd like to think I have a pretty large vocabulary (even if it's not always projected in this blog. Hey, a writer has to have some place to vent sometimes, right?). But reading through the vocabulary "Hit List" as my book calls it, there's absolutely no way I know all the definitions for those words.

Another big problem with the GRE is that it's computer adaptive. If you speak like a normal person and have no idea what this means, it means that the computer you take the GRE exam on is mean, and far too smart. It assumes you have the average score for a particular section, and, depending on whether you answer a question right or wrong, asks you a harder or easier question next. Let's put this into perspective.
Let's say you're taking the verbal section, and the average score is 450. Let's just pretend. This means the first question the computer gives you is an "average" question for that section. If you get that question right, it raises you score some percent, and gives you a harder question. If you get it wrong, it lowers your score, and gives you an easier question, most likely of the same type you got wrong so that it can pound your misery into you over and over again. Anyway. This type of testing means the questions not only get harder, but the percent by which it raises or lowers your score also gets smaller. This means that the first questions are worth more than the last.
And that's my long-winded rant about the GRE exam.

Does it make me less of an author because I keep getting lower scores on the Verbal part of my practice tests than the Math section? Or does it just mean that I don't know the third listed definition of "catholic" in the dictionary?

p.s. More Grad School posts to come that actually have to do with the schools. But the next blog will be once again about writing.

p.p.s I do not own that comic. It's property of the website posted at the bottom of it.