Tag Archives: GRE’s

Application-ing

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Warning: This post is a blatant attempt to justify the imminent decline in my postings over the next month and a half.

I am now officially in the thick of the graduate school application process. Some observations:

- While not as stressful, per se, as I thought it was going to be, the busywork involved is much, much more time-consuming. As a digital enthusiast, I’m all for online applications. However, even with using the Quicksilver clipboard to copy and paste common fields, if I have to enter “Pomona College” and “History” into one more text box I’m going to lose it. Cough, need for a common app, cough.

- Many thanks to Jeremy Young for offering up his kind advice for graduate school, and then going ahead and writing a lengthy and quite comprehensive posting at Progressive Historians on the process of applying to graduate schools in history. For a similar, albeit dated, post, see John King and Andrew McMichael’s article at AHA.

- The more and more time I spend dealing with the GRE (test date: October 30th), the more and more I loathe the test and everything it stands for. It costs $140 for the very privilege of taking the test. From there, ETS will send your scores to the first four schools absolutely free (doesn’t this sound like an infomercial?), and at the low, low cost of only $20 a school after that. In all, I’ll be paying a little less than $300 to this company in order to show schools that I remember have no idea what cosine is, know the meaning of recognize the word “consanguinity,” and can write a coherent series of sentences so that a machine grader can read it. I’m not kidding, they have a machine analyze your writing section and compare it to a human grader to maintain fairness. Which is actually kind of cool, I’d love to see the algorithms behind it…

- Finally, since this is quite evidently not a serious posting, The Onion’s Historical Archive last week was amazing.

In conclusion, I will be in blogging semi-hibernation for the near future due to writing personal statements, remembering what cosine is, and anxiously following the most historically monumental presidential election of my young lifetime.

Just GRE-at

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In my gradual meander down the grad school application path, I am trying my best to ignore the glaring fact that I need to take the GRE’s. I have yet to register for them, although I occasionally go to the website and get outraged at the entire process which, in my view, is a complete scam. Just as occasionally, I will flip through the two year-old used GRE book I bought for five bucks, wonder what exactly a divisor is, sigh, and usually go make myself a sandwich. The key step, of course, is leaving the book open on the table at all times, so I can at least pretend that I’m preparing to take the test.

After four years of a liberal-arts education, such a multiple-choice standardized test appears like some distasteful and foreign apparition from my past. I disagree with the entire concept on a variety of levels. Although I realize schools want a consistent metric for evaluating “intelligence,” tests such as the GRE’s and SAT’s use the broadest possible brush to paint applicants. I can almost guarantee you that a student receiving a 1600 on the GRE is intelligent. I can similarly promise that someone receiving a 900 probably wouldn’t do well at Harvard. But looking at the difference between a 1300 and a 1500 for evaluating someone’s qualifications to attend your institution? It’s complete bogus. And while I realize that most grad schools (hopefully) use it as a an extremely general indicator, I just don’t see the point. Of course, the deeper problem is one of privilege and money: students and their parents spend hundreds of dollars on courses that teach them how to take these tests. This puts anyone else at a disadvantage, and works against any objective measurement of intelligence. It’s a broken system.

In the tradition of full disclosure, I openly admit that my GRE score will be the weakest part of my application. My “diagnostic test” was shockingly abysmal not only in the math section (which I was expecting, given the fact that I was a history major), but surprisingly low in the verbal section as well. All that’s left is for me to bomb the writing section. In conclusion, I am not objective, but I am curious: do the admissions boards for history PhD programs actually look at these scores? How much does it play into the decision?

In case it wasn’t obvious, I wrote this post in a procastinatory fit during another failed attempt at studying out of my trusty GRE prep book. Fortunately I remembered the key step of studying: I’ve left the book open on the table next to me. Okay polynomials, lets see what you’re made of…