It's been three weeks since my last post...
Holy mother of God! Where did summer go? I swear it was June last week. Oh well. It has been a really long time since I updated last, so here's a real quick overview.
Job: Like it, settling in nicely and my boss just loves me. Yay! I've been given three big projects, one is completely finished, one is at a standstill until my boss finishes her part of the new software and the other is about halfway done.
Home: New place is great, although I lost power this morning and couldn't open the fuse box. Good news though, the whole building went out, so it didn't matter that I couldn't open the fuse box. Had to shower in the dark, but I had hot water.
KP: He's going great and now has THREE days off vs. only one like last year, so woot! However, I think he's bored, so I'm trying to think of a hobby he can do at night. Apparently, brewing beer isn't enough. (I bought him a home brewing kit for Christmas, which he still hasn't used...grrr).
RPG: All games are doing great and I'll do some pimping soon. We've had some big threads in post_bellum which have been sweet. I have all 14 of my characters active 3 to 4 threads a month, plus do_bad_things should be starting soon, I'm playing Sookie. Fun fun
NaNo: Did some plotting for NaNo this year. I'm writing the sequel to my 2007 NaNo entitled Buts Words can Never Die, which is a young adult Nancy Drew Style mystery. I'm hoping to publish it someday and have a few friends reading the 3rd draft of it as we speak. The new NaNo takes place over the summer and will be call Camp Dead End and will involve smuggling...I'm thinking drugs, but I'm not sure. I do know there will be camp rivalry, kidnapping and good looking lifeguards. The main character is only 15.
Weight: Down 13...want to drop 7 more before end of year which is part of my 101
Rhodora We are producing Agnes of God in the fall. Auditions soon...need to find space and confirm with director his schedule. I may just pick dates without him just to get things moving. I'm working on this over the weekend.
Future: I've talked with a few friends and done basic (I mean, I've look online at two schools) about grad school for creative writing. My facebook wife, Connie, is in a graduate program at John Hopkins and it's only 9 course, including thesis and she should have it complete next summer. So, I've been saving and thinking about applying or looking into the GREs. This morning I came across an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education which is a university industry paper that my company subscribes to. I thought it was really interesting and I've decided to share it. It's under the cut bc it's long and I blatantly stole it bc I'm not sure how to share it without making anyone interested in reading, sign up for a subscription. It's good and I suggest you read it.
Anyways, that's my life up until now. I'll try to update more often.
Kisses!
February 6, 2009
Testing the Test
An English professor takes the GRE and questions its value
By Michael Bérubé
I did a very foolhardy thing this fall. I retook the Graduate Record Examination in English literature, 25 years after I entered graduate school at the University of Virginia.
The potential for embarrassment, I thought, was enormous - and, therefore, so was the perverse attraction. It seemed like a stunt out of a David Lodge novel. What if an English professor got a lower GRE score than some of the applicants who had been rejected from his own graduate program? It's not inconceivable: I haven't taught literature written before 1800 since … oh, I don't know, sometime around 1800. But once upon a time, I was pretty well versed in the history of English verse. At Virginia, when I was writing my dissertation, I taught discussion sections of the course on the "History of English Literature" required for majors - the kind that often goes by the informal name "Beowulf to Virginia Woolf," or, even more colloquially, "Snortin' the Norton," after the ubiquitous anthology.
Before that, when I was an impressionable young undergraduate thing, Columbia University's English department required all its majors to complete four out of five "sequence" courses in literature before 1800; the 1500-1600 and 1600-1660 courses, notably, assigned fairly little Shakespeare and Milton, on the grounds that one really should study those authors in classes dedicated exclusively to their work. (That, of course, in addition to Columbia's admirable core courses in Western literature, philosophy, music, and art.)
All that might sound like excellent preparation for the English GRE, and in a way, it was. It was also valuable in its own right. And because my "specialties" (if one can speak of undergraduate specialties) were British modernism and 20th-century American literature, I thought at the time that I had the canon covered. Imagine my dismay, then, to find that my literature examination asked a couple of questions about medieval literature, more than a couple about the Renaissance, a fair number about the 18th century, a modest few about early 20th century, and a barrage (or so it seemed to me) of questions about the Romantics and the Victorians, about whom I knew only the barest minimum. What did I do? I guessed on a few, even though I didn't know my Shelley from my Keats. And I passed on a lot more, knowing that every unanswered question would register as "minus 1" on my total, whereas every wrong answer would register as "minus 1.25," taking a big bite out of a correct answer.
In 1981, at the age of 20, I wound up with a 650 on the English GRE, good enough to clamber into the 88th percentile. My verbal and math scores on the general exam were 720s, and my score on the then-experimental "logic" section (where I was asked a battery of questions about how many green cars are parked in front of Bob's house on Thursday if Sue, Ellen, and Tom agree to eat at a Chinese restaurant twice a week) was a gratifying 790. Too bad it didn't count. My peers and I were uniformly panicked about the test, but unfortunately I didn't panic until it was too late to sign up for a retake before submitting my graduate-school applications. I took the whole thing in one six-hour sitting.
I was not surprised, in 1981, that the canon of literature in English ended with the high modernists - indeed, well before T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner picked up their Nobel prizes (in 1948 and 1949, respectively). But I've been intensely curious about how the exam might have changed in the intervening years. Since 1981, my field has witnessed the rise of interpretive theory and the controversies over canon revision. How had the test responded? Similarly, since 1981 I've gone from sweating out the application stage to serving on graduate-admissions committees. Now that I've reviewed hundreds of applications, only cursorily glancing at each applicant's GRE scores (the better to focus on the most important thing in the application dossier, the writing sample - which not a single university required of me in 1981), would I think the test had any useful purpose at all?
I took the practice test instead of the "real" test, for a number of reasons. I wanted to be able to look over the questions afterward - that is, in the course of writing this essay; I wanted to see what percentage of test takers had gotten each question right (the answer sheet provides that useful information); and, not least, I wanted to get my score immediately, instead of waiting the requisite four to six weeks. (If you take the general test online, you can get your scores in 10 to 15 days; the subject test, however, is not available online.) I didn't cheat, I promise: I sat down on Tuesday, October 14, 2008, started the test at 7 p.m., and finished at 9:30. I did not, however, use a No. 2 pencil.
The test consisted largely of five types of questions. Some required you to identify individual authors and works; some required a more-general knowledge of literature and literary history (catching allusions, knowing your Aesthetes from your Augustans, finding your way around a pastoral elegy). Some involved high-end reading comprehension, the kind that entails an understanding of various forms of irony. Some involved low-end reading comprehension; there were no fewer than three questions that asked me to spot the obsolete idiomatic usage. (After looking them over again, I decided to call those "IF U CN RD THS U CN GO 2 GRD SKL" questions.) And some questions, I was surprised to see, were basic grammar/usage questions, like the one that asked whether "eradicate" in the line of poetry "plants new set to be eradicate" is a present indicative, a past participle, a subjunctive form, an infinitive form, or an imperative form. Yeah, like that's gonna come up at some point in your graduate studies.
It's tempting to say I missed only the bad questions - and there were plenty of bad questions. Not just the grammar/usage ones, either; especially bad was the question that asked whether Book III, Lines 122-34 of Paradise Lost (beginning with "They trespass, authors to themselves in all," as God discusses the incipient fall of Adam and Eve) presents an explanation of "(a) foreknowledge and free will can coexist, (b) Satan chose of his own free will to rebel, (c) the fall of humankind makes possible Christ's victory, (d) humankind's praise of God is worthless without free choice, or (e) God will punish and excuse in the way that He has chosen." (I got it right, though after some grumbling; it's (e), though (a) is quite plausible, and if you go back and look at the immediate context of the poem, you'll find that God is talking about (b), (c), and (d) as well.)
The three questions that asked you to identify which city was being described in which poem - those were bad questions too, suitable more for Jeopardy! than for an exam in English literature. Alas, I got many bad questions right, sometimes through sheer dumb luck. Among the ones I missed, I couldn't remember what the "euphuistic" style is, and I couldn't remember which war novelist - Stephen Crane, Faulkner, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, or Norman Mailer - had not seen combat. But I also missed a few good questions, the kind you wish you could have back - the kind about which you might say, as I did, "Dang, it's been almost 30 years since I read Much Ado About Nothing."
About the changes over the past 25 years, there is some good news and some bad news. Good news first: The expanded canon was accommodated pretty well here. There was a question about Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (the 1688 novella by one of England's first female writers to earn a living from her craft), a question about Olaudah Equiano (the 18th-century writer whose autobiography was a landmark in British debates over abolition of the slave trade), and a question about Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977, the most recent work of literature to appear on the exam). You wouldn't have seen any of those in 1981. "Ah, but no Herman Melville or Henry Fielding," I thought upon finishing the exam. "The National Association of Scholars is right - those upstart women and members of minority groups are displacing the great white guys." Whereupon I went back and realized I was mistaken: There was a question about Fielding's Tom Jones and a question about Ralph Ellison's discussion of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." I'd gotten them both right but had forgotten they were there. Over all, with regard to the old canon and the new, the test was remarkably comprehensive - covering every period of English literature as well as a great deal of material in other languages (in translation), ranging from the Greek classics (Identify the allusion to Niobe! Know your Orestes from your Telemachus!) to Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters.
But the "theory" questions were a joke, a very bad joke. Literally. The first question involving literary theory - 54 questions into a 230-question exam - asked students to identify parodies of Marxist, reader-response, and structuralist criticism. The Marxist parody was hideous: "Fulvia Morgana said that the function of criticism was to wage undying war on the very concept of 'literature' itself, which was nothing more than an instrument of bourgeois hegemony, a fetichistic [sic!] reification of so-called aesthetic values erected and maintained through an elitist education system in order to conceal the brutal facts of class oppression under industrial capitalism." My stars! Who knew that Fredric Jameson and Raymond Williams could be so reductive?
There were, in fact, very few "theory"questions - one involving Harold Bloom (the word "clinamen" was the giveaway), one involving the late Northrop Frye, and one basically asking you to identify the author of Writing Degree Zero (answer, Roland Barthes). And OK, maybe the one about female readers being asked to sympathize with stories of heroic men surrounded by scheming or trivial women was an "intro to feminist theory" question. But that's about it. Abysmal, really, if you're designing an exam that has anything to do with graduate study in English. Not that every student immerses herself in theory, of course; but most students, it's safe to say, will be expected to understand and respond to a "theoretical" argument - a real one, not a parody of one - at some point in their graduate studies.
I do have some sympathy with the test's designers, though. Apparently, it's quite hard to come up with questions about anything written after 1950 - poetry, drama, fiction, or criticism and theory - that won't elicit incorrect answers from more than 75 percent of test takers. The question on Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire? Only 22 percent got that one. Harold Pinter? Twenty-four percent. Isak Dinesen? Eighteen percent. Philip Larkin? Seventeen percent. (I missed that one too.) The 19 percent who got the correct response to the Frye question should probably be seen in this context: The exam makes too many people miss when it edges too close to the present. Perhaps contemporary literature isn't nearly so prevalent in the college curriculum as casual observers think - or, possibly, the contemporary "canon" is still in flux, as well it should be. But at least Frye beat out the Victorian-era stalwart Anthony Trollope, down there with Larkin at 17 percent. Whew! Good thing I've read Trollope's The Warden and know who Septimus Harding is.
But after I finished the test, tabulated my score, and had some geeky fun finding out which questions were "easy" and "hard" according to the correct-response rate, I decided that the whole thing was decidedly disappointing. Very little of the test, as far as I could see, had anything to do with gauging someone's aptitude for graduate study in literature; it was, instead, as if I'd played an arduous two-and-a-half-hour parlor game. And that's apparently how some departments of English treat the English GRE. Although many programs require it, my own does not, and back at my old haunt, Columbia, the graduate-admissions Web page declares, "Our department does not require the GRE Subject Test in English literature, which we regard as unsubstantive and not predictive of the quality of graduate work." Over all, according to the most recent "MLA Guide to Doctoral Programs in English and Other Modern Languages," 41.5 percent of English departments require the subject GRE test, whereas 96.2 percent require a writing sample. When I asked my department head whether I'd wasted my time with a test that would have no significance if I were an applicant to my own program, she said, "Pretty much, yeah. But it does sound like fun." A supposedly fun thing, in the words of the late David Foster Wallace, that I'll never do again.
For our College of the Liberal Arts, however, the GRE scores on the general test are common currency because they supply a quantitative measure for doling out fellowships and assessing the "quality" of an incoming class of students. (Their scores are higher than those of their counterparts 10 years ago - and that's how we know we're getting better!) That aspect of the system strikes me as a necessary evil, since fellowship money has to be divvied up somehow, and there are no reliable qualitative measures of applicants' talents - no good way to determine whether an incoming class is 8 percent philosophically deeper than its predecessors, or 12 percent more capable of historicizing a cultural formation. (All our students receive stipends; some also receive "top-offs," which depend in part on GRE scores.) But for my purposes, as I noted above, the most important thing in a student's application dossier is the writing sample, and I would be surprised if very many of my colleagues in literature departments thought differently. The writing sample, after all, offers us a chance to read and assess the kind of work we're actually going to ask our students to do.
This is an interesting moment in the history of the GRE. The SAT's authority is eroding slowly but surely, as one college after another finds more substantial and nuanced ways of assessing its undergraduate applicants. But the GRE and other graduate-level exams may be looking good. In the fall, the Educational Testing Service embarked on a new campaign to encourage more undergraduates to take the tests - and traditionally, in financial crises, college-educated Americans turn to postgraduate education and try to pick up a few more degrees. If you've lost a third of your savings in the stock market and your job prospects are looking bleak, it's a good time to sign up for the GRE - not that the ETS puts it precisely that way. Its Web site at www.takethegre.com features "students" like the thoughtful young woman sitting on a mountaintop, writing in her journal. To her left, just above her head, are the words: "Something to fall back on once the 'I'm going to backpack around the world' thing is covered." The idea, as ETS makes clear, is that it's good to keep your options open - and GRE scores are valid for five years. Why not take the test just in case? You have nothing to lose except the testing fee and the hours of preparation.
Does it work? Are postgraduate degrees a good hedge against recession? In a crisis as severe as our current one, I honestly don't know. But I certainly hope so - not for the sake of our graduate programs so much as for the sake of my fellow citizens and the global information economy in which they hope to participate. One ETS official I spoke to in the fall told me that although people usually respond to recessions by going back to school, the problem this time around is that it's harder to get student loans; this is, after all, a credit crisis. Another spokesman told me this month that although GRE test-taking was down 2 percent, it was down from a record year in 2007 - and registrations for the test had hit a peak in September 2008, just as the economic news began to look catastrophic. But were those registrations a response to the financial crisis, or to the ETS ad campaign? No one can say for sure, but both officials considered the 2008 numbers to be "flat," and both expected 2009 to be a healthy year for the GRE.
And what of the Literature in English subject test? Again, I sympathize with its designers and their impossible task. How can you test someone's aptitude for reading literature? What, for that matter, is "literature"? The question bedevils not only the testing service but every department of literature: The discipline of literary study is amorphously perverse, not because of the advent of "theory," but because literature itself covers everything in the world and makes up other worlds as well. The GRE subject test seems to be something of a compromise - a compromise among at least three different constituencies: those who believe that applicants should demonstrate an understanding of literary history and ability to analyze forms, those who believe that applicants should know who wrote what when, and those who believe that applicants should be able to read all kinds of texts closely and with great care.
Constituencies one and two tend to see themselves as a thin blue line between disciplinary competence and interdisciplinary fraud. Constituency three suspects that the verbal test on the GRE general exam is a better measure of applicants than the subject test: that verbal acuity is more important than the ability to identify Septimus Harding or the euphuistic style. Having retaken the subject test after all these years, I am unambiguously in the third constituency. What will you be asked to do as a graduate student in literature? It's hard to say. But whether you're dealing with Geoffrey Chaucer or Slavoj Zizek, you'll probably be asked to compose sustained critical arguments about difficult and elusive texts. So if I had my druthers, I'd do away with the English GRE altogether - despite its potential use in trivia contests - and award graduate fellowships on the basis of the verbal GRE, together with faculty evaluations of applicants' writing samples. Those evaluations can be ranked and numbered, if need be.
And oh, yes, my score. Very well. I opened with a nice streak of 58 consecutive hits, breaking Joe DiMaggio's record on the 1941 GRE, but from that point on, I stumbled over my areas of ignorance, lapses of memory, and subtle but decisive misreadings of questions. Of the 230 questions, I answered 214 correctly and seven incorrectly, passing on nine. That gave me a raw score of 212.25, just barely good enough for a 760, in the 99th percentile along with everyone who scored anywhere from 740 to 800.
"You know what will happen," I said to my wife as I tabulated my score. "Everyone will say, 'theory-besotted postmodern cultural-studies professor fails to ace English GRE,' and I'll be Exhibit A in the Association of Literary Surly Curmudgeons' argument that literary study has gone straight downhill."
"No, that's not what's going to happen," Janet replied. "People will simply think you're showing off."
Showing off? For goodness sake, I missed a Much Ado About Nothing question, and you won't see top-shelf Shakespeareans like Marjorie Garber or Stephen Greenblatt doing that. No, like the Jeopardy! contestant who suddenly forgets that Franklin Roosevelt's middle name was Delano, I had my embarrassing brain freezes here and there. Let those of you who have taken the real GRE in the past year throw the first stone.
Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. His most recent book is Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Job: Like it, settling in nicely and my boss just loves me. Yay! I've been given three big projects, one is completely finished, one is at a standstill until my boss finishes her part of the new software and the other is about halfway done.
Home: New place is great, although I lost power this morning and couldn't open the fuse box. Good news though, the whole building went out, so it didn't matter that I couldn't open the fuse box. Had to shower in the dark, but I had hot water.
KP: He's going great and now has THREE days off vs. only one like last year, so woot! However, I think he's bored, so I'm trying to think of a hobby he can do at night. Apparently, brewing beer isn't enough. (I bought him a home brewing kit for Christmas, which he still hasn't used...grrr).
RPG: All games are doing great and I'll do some pimping soon. We've had some big threads in post_bellum which have been sweet. I have all 14 of my characters active 3 to 4 threads a month, plus do_bad_things should be starting soon, I'm playing Sookie. Fun fun
NaNo: Did some plotting for NaNo this year. I'm writing the sequel to my 2007 NaNo entitled Buts Words can Never Die, which is a young adult Nancy Drew Style mystery. I'm hoping to publish it someday and have a few friends reading the 3rd draft of it as we speak. The new NaNo takes place over the summer and will be call Camp Dead End and will involve smuggling...I'm thinking drugs, but I'm not sure. I do know there will be camp rivalry, kidnapping and good looking lifeguards. The main character is only 15.
Weight: Down 13...want to drop 7 more before end of year which is part of my 101
Rhodora We are producing Agnes of God in the fall. Auditions soon...need to find space and confirm with director his schedule. I may just pick dates without him just to get things moving. I'm working on this over the weekend.
Future: I've talked with a few friends and done basic (I mean, I've look online at two schools) about grad school for creative writing. My facebook wife, Connie, is in a graduate program at John Hopkins and it's only 9 course, including thesis and she should have it complete next summer. So, I've been saving and thinking about applying or looking into the GREs. This morning I came across an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education which is a university industry paper that my company subscribes to. I thought it was really interesting and I've decided to share it. It's under the cut bc it's long and I blatantly stole it bc I'm not sure how to share it without making anyone interested in reading, sign up for a subscription. It's good and I suggest you read it.
Anyways, that's my life up until now. I'll try to update more often.
Kisses!
February 6, 2009
Testing the Test
An English professor takes the GRE and questions its value
By Michael Bérubé
I did a very foolhardy thing this fall. I retook the Graduate Record Examination in English literature, 25 years after I entered graduate school at the University of Virginia.
The potential for embarrassment, I thought, was enormous - and, therefore, so was the perverse attraction. It seemed like a stunt out of a David Lodge novel. What if an English professor got a lower GRE score than some of the applicants who had been rejected from his own graduate program? It's not inconceivable: I haven't taught literature written before 1800 since … oh, I don't know, sometime around 1800. But once upon a time, I was pretty well versed in the history of English verse. At Virginia, when I was writing my dissertation, I taught discussion sections of the course on the "History of English Literature" required for majors - the kind that often goes by the informal name "Beowulf to Virginia Woolf," or, even more colloquially, "Snortin' the Norton," after the ubiquitous anthology.
Before that, when I was an impressionable young undergraduate thing, Columbia University's English department required all its majors to complete four out of five "sequence" courses in literature before 1800; the 1500-1600 and 1600-1660 courses, notably, assigned fairly little Shakespeare and Milton, on the grounds that one really should study those authors in classes dedicated exclusively to their work. (That, of course, in addition to Columbia's admirable core courses in Western literature, philosophy, music, and art.)
All that might sound like excellent preparation for the English GRE, and in a way, it was. It was also valuable in its own right. And because my "specialties" (if one can speak of undergraduate specialties) were British modernism and 20th-century American literature, I thought at the time that I had the canon covered. Imagine my dismay, then, to find that my literature examination asked a couple of questions about medieval literature, more than a couple about the Renaissance, a fair number about the 18th century, a modest few about early 20th century, and a barrage (or so it seemed to me) of questions about the Romantics and the Victorians, about whom I knew only the barest minimum. What did I do? I guessed on a few, even though I didn't know my Shelley from my Keats. And I passed on a lot more, knowing that every unanswered question would register as "minus 1" on my total, whereas every wrong answer would register as "minus 1.25," taking a big bite out of a correct answer.
In 1981, at the age of 20, I wound up with a 650 on the English GRE, good enough to clamber into the 88th percentile. My verbal and math scores on the general exam were 720s, and my score on the then-experimental "logic" section (where I was asked a battery of questions about how many green cars are parked in front of Bob's house on Thursday if Sue, Ellen, and Tom agree to eat at a Chinese restaurant twice a week) was a gratifying 790. Too bad it didn't count. My peers and I were uniformly panicked about the test, but unfortunately I didn't panic until it was too late to sign up for a retake before submitting my graduate-school applications. I took the whole thing in one six-hour sitting.
I was not surprised, in 1981, that the canon of literature in English ended with the high modernists - indeed, well before T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner picked up their Nobel prizes (in 1948 and 1949, respectively). But I've been intensely curious about how the exam might have changed in the intervening years. Since 1981, my field has witnessed the rise of interpretive theory and the controversies over canon revision. How had the test responded? Similarly, since 1981 I've gone from sweating out the application stage to serving on graduate-admissions committees. Now that I've reviewed hundreds of applications, only cursorily glancing at each applicant's GRE scores (the better to focus on the most important thing in the application dossier, the writing sample - which not a single university required of me in 1981), would I think the test had any useful purpose at all?
I took the practice test instead of the "real" test, for a number of reasons. I wanted to be able to look over the questions afterward - that is, in the course of writing this essay; I wanted to see what percentage of test takers had gotten each question right (the answer sheet provides that useful information); and, not least, I wanted to get my score immediately, instead of waiting the requisite four to six weeks. (If you take the general test online, you can get your scores in 10 to 15 days; the subject test, however, is not available online.) I didn't cheat, I promise: I sat down on Tuesday, October 14, 2008, started the test at 7 p.m., and finished at 9:30. I did not, however, use a No. 2 pencil.
The test consisted largely of five types of questions. Some required you to identify individual authors and works; some required a more-general knowledge of literature and literary history (catching allusions, knowing your Aesthetes from your Augustans, finding your way around a pastoral elegy). Some involved high-end reading comprehension, the kind that entails an understanding of various forms of irony. Some involved low-end reading comprehension; there were no fewer than three questions that asked me to spot the obsolete idiomatic usage. (After looking them over again, I decided to call those "IF U CN RD THS U CN GO 2 GRD SKL" questions.) And some questions, I was surprised to see, were basic grammar/usage questions, like the one that asked whether "eradicate" in the line of poetry "plants new set to be eradicate" is a present indicative, a past participle, a subjunctive form, an infinitive form, or an imperative form. Yeah, like that's gonna come up at some point in your graduate studies.
It's tempting to say I missed only the bad questions - and there were plenty of bad questions. Not just the grammar/usage ones, either; especially bad was the question that asked whether Book III, Lines 122-34 of Paradise Lost (beginning with "They trespass, authors to themselves in all," as God discusses the incipient fall of Adam and Eve) presents an explanation of "(a) foreknowledge and free will can coexist, (b) Satan chose of his own free will to rebel, (c) the fall of humankind makes possible Christ's victory, (d) humankind's praise of God is worthless without free choice, or (e) God will punish and excuse in the way that He has chosen." (I got it right, though after some grumbling; it's (e), though (a) is quite plausible, and if you go back and look at the immediate context of the poem, you'll find that God is talking about (b), (c), and (d) as well.)
The three questions that asked you to identify which city was being described in which poem - those were bad questions too, suitable more for Jeopardy! than for an exam in English literature. Alas, I got many bad questions right, sometimes through sheer dumb luck. Among the ones I missed, I couldn't remember what the "euphuistic" style is, and I couldn't remember which war novelist - Stephen Crane, Faulkner, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, or Norman Mailer - had not seen combat. But I also missed a few good questions, the kind you wish you could have back - the kind about which you might say, as I did, "Dang, it's been almost 30 years since I read Much Ado About Nothing."
About the changes over the past 25 years, there is some good news and some bad news. Good news first: The expanded canon was accommodated pretty well here. There was a question about Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (the 1688 novella by one of England's first female writers to earn a living from her craft), a question about Olaudah Equiano (the 18th-century writer whose autobiography was a landmark in British debates over abolition of the slave trade), and a question about Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977, the most recent work of literature to appear on the exam). You wouldn't have seen any of those in 1981. "Ah, but no Herman Melville or Henry Fielding," I thought upon finishing the exam. "The National Association of Scholars is right - those upstart women and members of minority groups are displacing the great white guys." Whereupon I went back and realized I was mistaken: There was a question about Fielding's Tom Jones and a question about Ralph Ellison's discussion of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." I'd gotten them both right but had forgotten they were there. Over all, with regard to the old canon and the new, the test was remarkably comprehensive - covering every period of English literature as well as a great deal of material in other languages (in translation), ranging from the Greek classics (Identify the allusion to Niobe! Know your Orestes from your Telemachus!) to Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters.
But the "theory" questions were a joke, a very bad joke. Literally. The first question involving literary theory - 54 questions into a 230-question exam - asked students to identify parodies of Marxist, reader-response, and structuralist criticism. The Marxist parody was hideous: "Fulvia Morgana said that the function of criticism was to wage undying war on the very concept of 'literature' itself, which was nothing more than an instrument of bourgeois hegemony, a fetichistic [sic!] reification of so-called aesthetic values erected and maintained through an elitist education system in order to conceal the brutal facts of class oppression under industrial capitalism." My stars! Who knew that Fredric Jameson and Raymond Williams could be so reductive?
There were, in fact, very few "theory"questions - one involving Harold Bloom (the word "clinamen" was the giveaway), one involving the late Northrop Frye, and one basically asking you to identify the author of Writing Degree Zero (answer, Roland Barthes). And OK, maybe the one about female readers being asked to sympathize with stories of heroic men surrounded by scheming or trivial women was an "intro to feminist theory" question. But that's about it. Abysmal, really, if you're designing an exam that has anything to do with graduate study in English. Not that every student immerses herself in theory, of course; but most students, it's safe to say, will be expected to understand and respond to a "theoretical" argument - a real one, not a parody of one - at some point in their graduate studies.
I do have some sympathy with the test's designers, though. Apparently, it's quite hard to come up with questions about anything written after 1950 - poetry, drama, fiction, or criticism and theory - that won't elicit incorrect answers from more than 75 percent of test takers. The question on Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire? Only 22 percent got that one. Harold Pinter? Twenty-four percent. Isak Dinesen? Eighteen percent. Philip Larkin? Seventeen percent. (I missed that one too.) The 19 percent who got the correct response to the Frye question should probably be seen in this context: The exam makes too many people miss when it edges too close to the present. Perhaps contemporary literature isn't nearly so prevalent in the college curriculum as casual observers think - or, possibly, the contemporary "canon" is still in flux, as well it should be. But at least Frye beat out the Victorian-era stalwart Anthony Trollope, down there with Larkin at 17 percent. Whew! Good thing I've read Trollope's The Warden and know who Septimus Harding is.
But after I finished the test, tabulated my score, and had some geeky fun finding out which questions were "easy" and "hard" according to the correct-response rate, I decided that the whole thing was decidedly disappointing. Very little of the test, as far as I could see, had anything to do with gauging someone's aptitude for graduate study in literature; it was, instead, as if I'd played an arduous two-and-a-half-hour parlor game. And that's apparently how some departments of English treat the English GRE. Although many programs require it, my own does not, and back at my old haunt, Columbia, the graduate-admissions Web page declares, "Our department does not require the GRE Subject Test in English literature, which we regard as unsubstantive and not predictive of the quality of graduate work." Over all, according to the most recent "MLA Guide to Doctoral Programs in English and Other Modern Languages," 41.5 percent of English departments require the subject GRE test, whereas 96.2 percent require a writing sample. When I asked my department head whether I'd wasted my time with a test that would have no significance if I were an applicant to my own program, she said, "Pretty much, yeah. But it does sound like fun." A supposedly fun thing, in the words of the late David Foster Wallace, that I'll never do again.
For our College of the Liberal Arts, however, the GRE scores on the general test are common currency because they supply a quantitative measure for doling out fellowships and assessing the "quality" of an incoming class of students. (Their scores are higher than those of their counterparts 10 years ago - and that's how we know we're getting better!) That aspect of the system strikes me as a necessary evil, since fellowship money has to be divvied up somehow, and there are no reliable qualitative measures of applicants' talents - no good way to determine whether an incoming class is 8 percent philosophically deeper than its predecessors, or 12 percent more capable of historicizing a cultural formation. (All our students receive stipends; some also receive "top-offs," which depend in part on GRE scores.) But for my purposes, as I noted above, the most important thing in a student's application dossier is the writing sample, and I would be surprised if very many of my colleagues in literature departments thought differently. The writing sample, after all, offers us a chance to read and assess the kind of work we're actually going to ask our students to do.
This is an interesting moment in the history of the GRE. The SAT's authority is eroding slowly but surely, as one college after another finds more substantial and nuanced ways of assessing its undergraduate applicants. But the GRE and other graduate-level exams may be looking good. In the fall, the Educational Testing Service embarked on a new campaign to encourage more undergraduates to take the tests - and traditionally, in financial crises, college-educated Americans turn to postgraduate education and try to pick up a few more degrees. If you've lost a third of your savings in the stock market and your job prospects are looking bleak, it's a good time to sign up for the GRE - not that the ETS puts it precisely that way. Its Web site at www.takethegre.com features "students" like the thoughtful young woman sitting on a mountaintop, writing in her journal. To her left, just above her head, are the words: "Something to fall back on once the 'I'm going to backpack around the world' thing is covered." The idea, as ETS makes clear, is that it's good to keep your options open - and GRE scores are valid for five years. Why not take the test just in case? You have nothing to lose except the testing fee and the hours of preparation.
Does it work? Are postgraduate degrees a good hedge against recession? In a crisis as severe as our current one, I honestly don't know. But I certainly hope so - not for the sake of our graduate programs so much as for the sake of my fellow citizens and the global information economy in which they hope to participate. One ETS official I spoke to in the fall told me that although people usually respond to recessions by going back to school, the problem this time around is that it's harder to get student loans; this is, after all, a credit crisis. Another spokesman told me this month that although GRE test-taking was down 2 percent, it was down from a record year in 2007 - and registrations for the test had hit a peak in September 2008, just as the economic news began to look catastrophic. But were those registrations a response to the financial crisis, or to the ETS ad campaign? No one can say for sure, but both officials considered the 2008 numbers to be "flat," and both expected 2009 to be a healthy year for the GRE.
And what of the Literature in English subject test? Again, I sympathize with its designers and their impossible task. How can you test someone's aptitude for reading literature? What, for that matter, is "literature"? The question bedevils not only the testing service but every department of literature: The discipline of literary study is amorphously perverse, not because of the advent of "theory," but because literature itself covers everything in the world and makes up other worlds as well. The GRE subject test seems to be something of a compromise - a compromise among at least three different constituencies: those who believe that applicants should demonstrate an understanding of literary history and ability to analyze forms, those who believe that applicants should know who wrote what when, and those who believe that applicants should be able to read all kinds of texts closely and with great care.
Constituencies one and two tend to see themselves as a thin blue line between disciplinary competence and interdisciplinary fraud. Constituency three suspects that the verbal test on the GRE general exam is a better measure of applicants than the subject test: that verbal acuity is more important than the ability to identify Septimus Harding or the euphuistic style. Having retaken the subject test after all these years, I am unambiguously in the third constituency. What will you be asked to do as a graduate student in literature? It's hard to say. But whether you're dealing with Geoffrey Chaucer or Slavoj Zizek, you'll probably be asked to compose sustained critical arguments about difficult and elusive texts. So if I had my druthers, I'd do away with the English GRE altogether - despite its potential use in trivia contests - and award graduate fellowships on the basis of the verbal GRE, together with faculty evaluations of applicants' writing samples. Those evaluations can be ranked and numbered, if need be.
And oh, yes, my score. Very well. I opened with a nice streak of 58 consecutive hits, breaking Joe DiMaggio's record on the 1941 GRE, but from that point on, I stumbled over my areas of ignorance, lapses of memory, and subtle but decisive misreadings of questions. Of the 230 questions, I answered 214 correctly and seven incorrectly, passing on nine. That gave me a raw score of 212.25, just barely good enough for a 760, in the 99th percentile along with everyone who scored anywhere from 740 to 800.
"You know what will happen," I said to my wife as I tabulated my score. "Everyone will say, 'theory-besotted postmodern cultural-studies professor fails to ace English GRE,' and I'll be Exhibit A in the Association of Literary Surly Curmudgeons' argument that literary study has gone straight downhill."
"No, that's not what's going to happen," Janet replied. "People will simply think you're showing off."
Showing off? For goodness sake, I missed a Much Ado About Nothing question, and you won't see top-shelf Shakespeareans like Marjorie Garber or Stephen Greenblatt doing that. No, like the Jeopardy! contestant who suddenly forgets that Franklin Roosevelt's middle name was Delano, I had my embarrassing brain freezes here and there. Let those of you who have taken the real GRE in the past year throw the first stone.
Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. His most recent book is Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).