If you are senior thinking about applying to graduate school, forget taking capstone courses in your major or writing a thesis. Your best bet at improving your chances of admission is taking a review course in high school geometry.
The Graduate Records Examinations, the test used in the assess ment of applicants to graduate programs, is composed largely of SAT-like multiple choice questions covering analogies, vocabulary and high school math through geometry. Unsurprisingly, the test has proven to be a poor predictor of an individual's success in graduate programs. The GRE Research Board is currently taking steps to reformat the test, and in so doing, should focus on assessing a student's ability to craft an argument, and avoid questions that involve simple memorization and regurgitation. While it is easy to test a person's knowledge of unfamiliar vocabulary words and theorems of congruency, the results are of little use in evaluating an applicant to most doctoral programs.
Admissions officers and students alike have long decried the disconnect between a student's performance on standardized tests and their actual academic abilities. However, schools need some mechanism to weed-out their applicant pools, and differentiate between students with similar GPAs and extracurricular achievements. Exams like the SAT and the GRE are necessary evils.
Yet, this does not excuse the poor design of the GRE. With the exception of an analytical writing section that was added in October 2002, the GRE is composed largely of multiple choice questions that test a student's ability to take a test, rather than actual reasoning and analytical skills. Members of the GRE Research Board, made up of graduate school deans from across the country, admit that the GRE is geared toward tricky analogies and the memorization of mathematical relationships--skills seldom utilized in most graduate programs.
With the exception of the analytical writing section, the remainder of the GRE should be scrapped. The verbal format should ask students to read material, synthesize information and construct an argument. The math section should force students to analyze data, rather than testing their ability to recall theorems and equations. Students in graduate programs in the humanities will need to write papers and construct arguments. If they need to decipher the context of a particularly tricky word, they can use a dictionary or a thesaurus. There is no point in testing pure mathematical knowledge, as most students have forgotten the math they learned in high school. Further, the GRE is useless to math and physics graduate programs as they are concerned with far more advanced math anyway.
The fact that the deans on the GRE Research Board have decided to put pressure of Educational Testing Services to change the GRE is positive. ETS is a for-profit corporation, and cares primarily about selling tests and collecting fees. They value the quality of their exams only in so far as they keep being used. The deans should continue to exert influence until the GRE is proven to be a more accurate measure of students' success at the next level of higher education.
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