GRE: Gimmick Ridden with Equivocations

Who is ready to play along with the new GRE?

I haven't been blogging as regularly these past few weeks because I've been overwhelmed with the demands of summer school, preparing for the GRE, a pressing amount of work professionally, and contending with the fact that summer school to-date hasn't been relaxing at all. 

Right now, I'm about 40 hours away from taking the GRE.  Yes, I am in graduate school.  Yes, I am succeeding in graduate school.  Yes, I still have to take this standardized test that is supposed to predict my performance in graduate school in order to apply to PhD programs.  What a farce!  This whole thing makes me angry for personal reasons, such as the fact that I do not see things in strict binaries of black and white and right and wrong.  Thus, I have a whole host of troubles trying to answer GRE questions that are supposedly straight forward, but are only straight forward if you think about things from a very narrow perspective...which is not a highly valued skill in English departments.  In fact, I am doing so well in graduate school precisely because I question people's assumptions and pick apart underlying meanings.  I really could go on and on about this.

I am also outraged at the big business of the GRE and how every school requires it, and it requires stupid tricks and techniques rather than real intelligence to perform well.  So, if you aren't of a very specific and certain kind of mind, you have to pay for study materials and possibly classes, etc.  You have to pay for scores to be sent to more than 3 schools and at the end of the day, GRE makes hundreds of dollars off of impoverished students without really telling anything about the potential for that student's success. 

But really, what I'm fired up about right now is the new format, which is supposed to be more useful...but really has a whole lot of questions based on a very specific type of logic that seems suspect to me.  You have social scientists and English majors all trying to take this damned thing, and I can't foresee how students who have been taught to think critically in either discipline will do very well with these ridiculous questions.  The biggest section that I am getting wrong...and whose answer choices are consistently rooted in faulty logic are the new "inference" questions.

I don't want to leave y'all out of this terrible experience because misery does love company.  So, I'm challenging you try out a few of the easy sample questions here to get a taste of how silly the new structure is: http://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/about/content/verbal_reasoning.  Remember schools require you to be in the 85th percentile for the most part, so if you get just one wrong out of four, you are sliding down a slipper slope.

Best of luck!  Bon courage!