Continuing my series on graduate school, I would like to pause a little while to celebrate the GRE exam.  Though it may be somewhat hard to believe, in the late spring of 2005 when I prepared for this exam I was not at all confident that I would enter graduate school at all.  In fact, I owe a great deal of the confidence needed to obtain two master’s degrees so far to my success at this particular exam, and I have even had the chance to help teach the writing section of this exam to some people thanks to a friend of mine as well.  In short, I owe this exam a fair amount of gratitude.

When I took the GRE exam two days shy of my 24th birthday, my goal was to obtain a 1000 on the exam so that I would qualify for a master’s degree program at the University of South Florida (which ended up being my first master’s, the Master’s of Science in Engineering Management).  My experiences as an undergraduate had not been particularly great, but I took advantage of the opportunity to study for the exam (studying for tests is something I am proficient in, luckily), to see what the format of the exam was and how I could gather and understanding of how well I was doing.

At the time I took the exam, the GRE was a computerized exam that graded to the student, giving harder questions (and therefore a higher score) once the moderate difficulty questions had been mastered, scaling up or down in a narrower and narrower range until the test taker ran out of questions.  I knew, therefore, that I would be doing a good job if the questions were difficult and that it would therefore be important to ace the beginning of the test, which would ensure a sufficiently high grade to pass (so long as each section was in the 500+ range, I knew I would have enough points to pass).

As it happened, I needn’t have worried.  I was not overly concerned with the writing section, and that ended up the best section of all (when I took the test there was only one writing assignment that I can remember, which ended up being about individualized education–and not surprisingly, perhaps, in light of my strengths test [1], I ended up arguing that a free and democratic society required a personalized education system geared to the strengths and interests of students rather than a mass education system with a one-size-fits-all regimine).  Despite my own abilities at standardized tests, which I consider highly ironic in light of my feisty and independent nature, I am far more interested in education that fits the particular interests of other students than in one which forces everyone into the same mold.  At any rate, it appears that the graders appreciated my arguments, as they gave me a 6.0 (a perfect score) on the writing section.  Since the time I took the test there was a textual analysis section of the test added, which I would have greatly enjoyed as well, to pick at the weak points in an argument.  That is a task that would have pleased me greatly to accomplish.

I knew that the math section was not going to be a huge problem when I saw a problem with 5 to the 27th power in it.  My result, a 780 in mathematics, would seem to indicate that my relief at seeing such a difficult problem was not entirely unjust.  I was not particularly worried about the verbal section, given that a huge section of the test was based on such matters as vocabulary and analogies, and my 690 there was likewise a relief, but not necessarily a surprise.  The total of 1470 was a bit better than I expected, and definitely well over what I was concerned about getting, as it meant that whatever beating my confidence had taken over a difficult undergraduate experience, my basic test-answering skills were still intact from high school, which was a relief.  As it happened, graduate school was a much more rewarding and pleasant experience than the first four years of university education.

I only bring up this particular subject at this point because it has not proven to be an easy task to get the GRE scores to the graduate programs I am looking at, in part because finding the codes to access the scores officially was not an easy task (given that at first the request for an 8 or 16 digit code that I did not possess caused problems), and in part because my own record keeping skills with my personal papers is less than orderly and systematic (in fact, it is quite the contrary).  At any rate, after multiple unsuccessful dealings with ETS, I got my own results in the mail today, and will probably have to search for a usable fax machine to send them off soon.  But I ought not to complain too much, for without the GRE I would not be in the position of waiting for a response from Ph.D programs, as my undergraduate grades would not have been sufficient for me to continue my education further had it dependent on those alone.  At least there is the chance for people to prove themselves through tests, though.  Thanks be to God for that.