GRE dream
So there's apparently a new version of the GRE that's debuting this August. This is the exam that you have to take in order to enter into graduate school.
I read this article last night a couple hours before going to bed and had a GRE "nightmare" as a result. It was pretty mild: basically I had to take the exam again for some reason, but I kept getting interrupted during the exam to take care of family stuff, causing me to run around the building. Also the proctor was inexperienced and therefore didn't know whether to start counting the time for the exam from the moment we were supposed to show up, or from the moment he finished reading directions, or from the moment we actually received our exams and started entering answers. He incorrectly opted for the first, trimming off a half hour, and so basically I finished with much of the exam unanswered and even unread. One highlight: for the reading comprehension part we had to answer questions regarding an essay by once_a_banana titled "Geocities Not Suitable For Hosting Poland's Database on Seeds". Yes, this was truly a nightmare. :-P
Going back to the NYT article, I was rather offended by this early line:
“We’re making changes to measure skills that the kids are more likely to be using when they are graduate students," says Dawn Piacentino, program director of the G.R.E.
Kids?? Kids?? Maybe she has an mental association of students=children, but most starting graduate students are well into their twenties or thirties. It also reveals an underlying power dynamic of her administrative role: she, having power over the students, is naturally the adult, and hence superior. Educationally, she's probably not superior at all. And apparently she even looks like an insensitive bitch.
I read this article last night a couple hours before going to bed and had a GRE "nightmare" as a result. It was pretty mild: basically I had to take the exam again for some reason, but I kept getting interrupted during the exam to take care of family stuff, causing me to run around the building. Also the proctor was inexperienced and therefore didn't know whether to start counting the time for the exam from the moment we were supposed to show up, or from the moment he finished reading directions, or from the moment we actually received our exams and started entering answers. He incorrectly opted for the first, trimming off a half hour, and so basically I finished with much of the exam unanswered and even unread. One highlight: for the reading comprehension part we had to answer questions regarding an essay by once_a_banana titled "Geocities Not Suitable For Hosting Poland's Database on Seeds". Yes, this was truly a nightmare. :-P
Going back to the NYT article, I was rather offended by this early line:
“We’re making changes to measure skills that the kids are more likely to be using when they are graduate students," says Dawn Piacentino, program director of the G.R.E.
Kids?? Kids?? Maybe she has an mental association of students=children, but most starting graduate students are well into their twenties or thirties. It also reveals an underlying power dynamic of her administrative role: she, having power over the students, is naturally the adult, and hence superior. Educationally, she's probably not superior at all. And apparently she even looks like an insensitive bitch.