A level of Dante's hell should be reserved for the GREs. And by that I mean for the nefarious, sadistic individual who had the brilliant idea of torturing poor (literally, the test costs $115) stressed fourth-years with a slow and painful death by bombardment of multiple choice questions.
To all you lucky, blessed students who are ignorant of the Graduate Record Examination (which is very few I'm sure, since everyone these days is going to graduate school. Well what else are we supposed to do in this economy, right?) pray thanks to your chosen deity.
This is the breakdown: There is a 45-minute math section, a 30-minute verbal section and two analytical essays. Oh, and they throw in an extra verbal or math section for research, but of course, unless you are psychic, you won't be able to tell which is real and which is fake (which is veracious and which is spurious, in GRE speak) and therefore, which section counts and which doesn't.
And by the way, this is all done on a computer, through a program called the CAT (Computer Adaptive Test) which basically determines if you are smart or dumb after the first few questions, and proceeds with the test accordingly.
Okay, so since I'm an English major, so the verbal section should be a piece of cake, right? But, no. Since the GRE actually tests Latin and not English, I'm screwed. Milton might have been able to ace this section. Remember those people who took Latin in high school just because, "It will really help me on my SATs." Ha. Oh, the SATs seem so far away, a facetious little joke, a ridiculously juvenile romp through standardized testing. I was a rebel then. I didn't give so much as a glance at those prep books or a step into a prep class. I probably even refused to get a full night's sleep before the test. Yeah, I was almost determined not to do well on the test, and yet prove them all wrong by getting into college anyway. Well, I've sold out, damn it. My floor currently is littered with these review books. I know, I'm a traitor to the cause! I've succumbed to the whole mini-economy whose foundation is putting a cost on teaching people how to take a test.
Okay, I have something else to confess. I've already taken the GREs. And let's just say that I have to take them again. Those horrific three-hours are a blank in my memory, except I remember that I started talking to myself. It got to a point where my tangential powers would grasp onto anything, like the name Miguel, for example, which innocently showed up in some sentence-completion question. And the resulting thought process was, "Miguel. Hmm. Miguel. I liked a Miguel once, he was on my swim team. He was hot. That summer was fun. I wonder what he's doing right now. That's funny, I wonder how many other girls taking this test knew a guy named Miguel. I think my roommate hooked up with a guy named Miguel in Spain," and so on and so forth.
Studying for this test is pointless yet indispensable. I have piles and piles of vocabulary cards (in very pretty pastel colors, at least) with words I didn't even know existed before some list of the top-one-hundred-words-you-must-absolutely-know-unless-you-want-to-get-a-terrible-score-and-not-get-accepted-into-any-grad-schools-EVER recommended very nicely that I should study them.
One of these words: Detumescence. Noun. Diminution of swelling.
Here are some other favorites: Legerdemain. Noun. Sleight of hand. Skullduggery. Noun. A devious device or trick.
The application of all these words takes four different guises: antonyms, sentence completion, analogies and the ever-dreaded reading comprehension.
And obviously the bane of my existence is the math section, although paradoxically I scored better on this portion than on my verbal, even though I ran out of time and didn't answer all the questions.
Example of a classic question: Aristotle, George Bush, Anna Nicole Smith, and a squirrel named Crouching Tiger are running in a 26-mile marathon to raise money for the Matthew Shepherd Scholarship Fund. They run at 3, 2, .002, and 4 miles per hour respectively. Taking into consideration that Anna stops for a makeup check every 10 minutes, and Aristotle and George Bush stop for an argument about rhetoric lasting 1.2 hours, and the squirrel is .8 p yards long with a particularly cute and furry tail with a diameter of 30 centimeters, what time in the day will Bush learn how to differentiate between the words lie and lay?
The second part of the question is: What percent of the total nuts the squirrel eats are pistachios, taking into consideration that he is allergic to cashews? And remember, take into account negative numbers, fractions, imaginary numbers, letters of the Russian alphabet and the phases of the moon in deciding if the answer in column A is always greater than the answer in column B, if it never is or if it is impossible to determine from the information given in the question.
Okay, back to the verbal section. Fine. I can deal with a sentence that goes something like: "And the poltroon capitulated to the raffish curmudgeon who had purloined his sister's honor, and left her to an ignominious situation where every day she sang dirges full of trenchant invective which had a lachrymose effect on the pusillanimous brother." Translation: The brother sucks. That's fine. I can deal with that. What I can't deal with is the reading comprehension. The passages are on topics like "Why the proliferation of trout is a problem in America's rivers," with ensuing questions like the following:Which of the following most clearly represents the author's tone in this passage.
1. Not sarcastic
2. Moderately sarcastic
3. Sarcastic
4.Very sarcastic
5. Cynical
Oh, and I couldn't let the analytical writing section escape my acrimonious, mordant, acerbic, biting wit.
Write in 45 minutes your position on this statement; feel free to use personal knowledge and experience. "Humankind is inherently evil."
First of all, there is this horrid little ritualistic examination
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