Thoughts on the GRE
Due to a change in my academic plans, a few months back I collected materials for the GRE, frantically studied for a bit less than a month, and then stopped all-together, having never taken the test. Now that things are more settled in my life and academic plans/hopes I have begun to study again at a more regular pace, with around five months to go until I’m finished with the dreaded thing. The result of all of this is that I have had much time to gain an impression of the test, a few of these thoughts are perhaps interesting enough to offer here:
1) Non-Americans, on the whole, seem to take the thing much more seriously than we in the States do (at least students from India and Korea). Some of this is certainly due to English not being their first language but the difference is so drastic as to point to the very different cultures they are coming out of, which apparently take education far more seriosuly than we lazy Americans. For example, the average American advice for the test runs something liek this: memorize 50 or so words, do a bit of work in a Kaplan book, take the on-line practice tests from ETS and you’ve prepared to the degree that is possible. The average Indian advice runs something like this: clear out four to six hours a day for five or six months, (if you can) pay a load of cash for a class or tutor, memorize 4-6 thousand words and pray you do well on test day. I’d put myself somewhere between the two extremes, not because I’m less lazy than my fellow countrypersons but because I had a real job for the past year and I now fear what could happen to me if I ever have to leave academia again. Like all good Americans, I have been habituated to function most efficiently when motivated by fear.
2) As most of the books say in their introductions’, the test is “crackable.” It’s learnable. To relate it to class-work, it’s more like studying for a difficult language exam than writing a difficult paper. With a hard language test coming up, there are twenty different things I could be studying relative to the test so I never get “stuck” because there’s always more to do. If I’m studying enough, I’ll go back over a topic a day or two later and find myself satisfied that I obviously made some progress the last time Ireviewed it. A good paper, however, is usually the result of at least three or four cumulative hours of staring at the screen and usually at least one major re-write (not to mention the hours of actually productive work). Like a huge language exam, if you can get enough material in front of you (try esnips.com for this) you can keep yourself busy with the small stuff for hours and then a few days later notice that you’ve made some substantial progress.
3) The test is a sort of crystallization of all that is so frightening about capitalist epistemology. With the exception of the role vocab knowledge plays in the test (which is substantial) the whole thing is designed so that it does not matter what you know, it matters how you know. Efficient and quick formal operation is the name of the game. Evil geniuses could one day rule the world via stellar performance on the GRE (that is if they don’t already). Knowledge as participation in divine enlightenment? Save it for your term paper champ, ETS is as concerned with the advancement of future Enron execs as it is with upstanding public servants.
In fact, I kind of feel silly writing “upstanding public servants” because we don’t expect them to be that way anymore, we don’t expect anyone to be that way really. We’re not trained (or tested) to.
