Christina Domenico | Reforming the GRE

Applying to graduate school? Get ready to familiarize yourself with some alphabet soup: GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT. The latter three concern those students applying to business, law and medical school. Students hoping to pursue the arts and sciences take the GRE, or the Graduate Record Examination.

What the GRE does is boil down a student's entire university experience to the timeless 1600-point scale. Whether a student applies for history or biophysics, the GRE judges them all the same.

Last week, the National Association for College Admission Counseling urged undergraduate admissions officers to shift attention from standardized tests to curriculum-based exams. Such tests - including the AP exams, International Baccalaureate and SAT Subject tests - serve as better predictors of academic success in college than the SAT or ACT, they argue.

It seems that undergraduate schools are beginning to shy away from the belief that standardized tests are the Bible of admissions. Shouldn't a similar logic follow for graduate schools that don't offer a test for their specific field?

College senior Anna Turetsky took the GRE in September and told me that "it's basically a slightly harder version of the SAT with a couple essays."

In fact, the quantitative section could be switched out with the math section from the SAT, and nobody would notice. Both sections include problems from geometry, algebra, arithmetic and data analysis - topics covered in the ninth grade.

From 2003 until 2006, 59.7 percent of physical sciences applicants and 69.9 percent of engineering applicants scored above a 700 on the quantitative section of the GRE. With such astronomically high scores, that section of the test hardly gives any leeway for comparison among test takers.

It's also irrelevant to fields within the humanities. History professor Margo Todd said that when looking at an applicant's GRE score, "We just look mostly at the verbal number."

"It's a general guideline about the student's ability to read intelligently."

The verbal section tests reading comprehension, analogies, antonyms and sentence completion - with vocabulary no sane person would ever use. I hardly see any purpose in recognizing words such as "noisome" and "peccadillo" in an analogy question without any contextual clues.

Only one part of the verbal section seems to matter - reading comprehension. 2007 College alumnus and GRE prep course teacher Gerard Leone said grad schools are looking for students who can understand about 80 percent of an article.

While that's a perfectly acceptable argument in favor of looking at a GRE score, there are still three other verbal sections which don't test that. A standardized test can't evaluate the higher-order thinking involved in digesting large amounts of information on a detailed topic.

Following the logic presented by NACAC in its report, graduate school admissions officers should focus more on students' work within their respective fields and their scores on relevant, curriculum-based exams - like the GRE subject tests.

And as Turetsky noted, "A lot of science programs don't care about the verbal section, and a lot of humanities programs don't care about the quantitative."

It seems that admissions officers could survive without sticking students at a test site for three hours and then interpreting half the score.

But at least they realize that scores aren't everything. "We look very closely at recommendations and their writing sample," Todd told me.

Both of those components can give a better picture of an applicant than any score could, especially when combined with an interview. Graduate school typically revolves more around individual in-depth work. A student's ability to complete a dissertation shouldn't be measured in 1600 points.

For now, students only take the GRE because they have to, as Leone and Turetsky both observed. Unlike the MCAT and LSAT, it's not a core component of an applicant's qualifications.

So you might want to accompany your alphabet soup with a healthy serving of arcane vocabulary to prepare for the GRE - simply because you have to do it.

Christina Domenico is a College senior from North Wildwood, N.J. Her e-mail is domenico@dailypennsylvanian.com. The Undersized Undergrad appears on Wednesdays.

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