Elizabeth Song | A smarter GRE exam

Just when you thought it was safe to relax, a whole slew of standardized tests is lurking around the corner. For the grad school crowd, the Educational Testing Service comes back to infect you with a nasty bout of SAT redux: MCAT, LSAT and GMAT. And don't forget the queen of them all, the Graduate Record Exam.

Don't get me wrong: the GRE is a necessary evil. We need it to compare Molly from Penn to Meg at Penn State. Yet we can do much more to make the exam deliver a fairer comparison.

Like most standardized exams, the GRE tries to do the impossible: assign a scaled score to intangibles like verbal ability. Let's improve the quality of this estimate by doing away with GRE antonyms. For good.

In 2002, the SAT cut analogies and introduced short reading passages instead. Officials should apply the same logic to the GRE's verbal section. For starters, the antonyms section screams third grade by requiring students to commit long lists of vocabulary words to memory. Along with multiplication tables and cursive script, they favor rote memorization over mastery. For a test that purports to predict grad-school success, the GRE should go beyond elementary skills.

That involves testing words in an embedded narrative context. We don't always have Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary around to find the meaning of "periphrastic." But we almost always have context cues. And it's exactly this kind of resourceful extrapolation that grad-school demands.

According to Dawn Piacentino, associate director of the GRE Program, "There's not a quick way to increase your verbal reasoning ability."

Unfortunately, the GRE sacrifices depth for breadth. The exam doesn't test a mastery of the finer shades of meaning that distinguish a Shakespeare from a hack romance writer. It conflates knowing a definition with knowing how to use a word.

Priya Dasgupta, a 2003 SEAS alumna and GRE program manager for Kaplan Test Prep, told me that the GRE formulaically repeats the same words over and over.

As a result, the GRE encourages vocabulary cramming in place of gradual acquisition through reading. Your ability to succeed in grad school won't ebb or wane significantly over the course of a one-week cram session. But based on this equation, your GRE score can.

In fact, the idea of testing vocabulary is overly prescriptive - planting the markers for an erudite vocabulary.

Some of these test words are like exotic caged birds, flitting around my head without the slightest application in the real world. Take pulchritudinous. Can't we just say "lovely" or "beautiful," which have all the resonances of personal familiarity? Why saddle our language with such a clunky word?

Test makers often have a penchant for ostentatious language that encourages young writers to replace lucid writing with dense, academic prose. Piacentino explains that "GRE test makers typically hold advanced degrees in literature and allied fields."

In addition, the GRE loves vivid personal adjectives - those "feeling words" worthy of a pedantic, Ph.D.-ed Mr. Rogers. All the words you need to know to write your first cheesy action novel, ace Creative Writing 101 or even craft a colorful column.

The test maker's challenge lies in selecting words that accurately reflect verbal finesse in grad school. Last November, ETS introduced changes to the GRE that emphasize cognitive skills by adding complex answer choices and manual entries. These changes, which shift away from vocabulary dependence, are a step in right direction for over half a million annual test takers.

But grad-school hopefuls should demand more from the GRE. And from future college graduates, ETS should certainly expect even more.

Elizabeth Song is a College junior from Clemmons, NC. Her e-mail is song@dailypennsylvanian.com. Striking a Chord appears Tuesdays.

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