About ten years ago, having found myself jobless, in possession of a more or less totally useless (on paper, at least; I’m not disparaging my education or anything) degree, and largely without achievable goals in my second year out of college, I began to consider what so many others in the same situation do: going back to school to earn a(n even more useless) terminal degree. My first order of business was to write to some universities to gauge receptiveness to my projected course of study. Now, granted, I can see how an unsolicited missive from a woman wishing to do an MFA in Directing (Theatre) alongside an MA/PhD in History, Classics and Anthropology of Religion might seem… well, a bit schizophrenic. But I was convinced that my supporting argument tied it all together, and some even thought it made a lot of sense. The ‘some’ in question, of course, being my friends and former professors, who might have just been humoring me.
Regardless, the response from the Universities I contacted (Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, among others – let it never be said that I lack ambition) was less than stellar. Some suggested (with varying degrees of snarkiness and condescension) that I make up my mind and pick just one course of study, others didn’t reply at all. Only one school seemed willing to go along with my harebrained scheme: the University of Wales. Now, I can’t even remember how I decided to get in touch with them to begin with, but apparently I hadn’t done a whole lot of research, because when I got this response and began to look into Aberystwyth and the surrounding area, I discovered that there are precisely two things in Aberystwyth: the University, and sheep. That’s it. No wonder the head of the department was so eager to have me. I expect I was the first person in some time to have an idea for a course of study that didn’t involve agriculture or animal husbandry.
On to Plan B: gain entry to one of my target schools, in whichever department would have me, and somehow cleverly sneak into my weirdo course of study. It was then that I discovered I wouldn’t get in anywhere, ever, without taking the GRE. OK, fine. I did well on the SAT and ACT back in high school; I was confident in the quality of my undergraduate education. This should be a piece of cake, I thought. I went out and picked up a book, skipped straight to the practice test and took it.
I failed.
Well, okay, I didn’t actually fail, because I’m not functionally illiterate. But I did really, really poorly. Looking back at the parts I did worst on, I realized my downfall was the analogies… you know, juvenile:jejune as hat:chicken and so forth. It seems that somewhere along the line, while I was developing my allegorical and metaphorical abilities, I lost all sense of traditional logic as applied to literature. Or something. Basically, I would sit and stare at these questions and the four multiple choice answers and, while I was able to exclude at least two of the choices right off the bat, as often as not I found myself able to make a strong argument for either of the two remaining ones. Ultimately my decisions became arbitrary, or worse, subjective – I would pick an answer because it sounded pretty (plinth is just so fun so say!) and not because I actually thought it was right. I did this because I realized I could no longer climb inside the head of the Testing Authority and give them the answer they were looking for. Also because I resented the fact that someone thought my entire 3 and a half year educational experience, which included reams of written work and I can’t even begin to calculate how much reading, could be assessed by a machine and a #2 pencil.
When I saw this article in The Atlantic Monthly (link via Arts & Letters Daily), my experience with the GRE (which I wound up never taking, thank you very little) came flooding back to me in all its humiliating and irritating glory. Apparently, they’re restructuring the SATs now, for those of you too lazy to click on the link, and they’ve axed the analogy section and replaced it with essays. But, true to form, the only way to get a decent score on the essay is to be boring, predictable, needlessly pedantic, and arguably crazy. It seems unimaginable to me that between Hemingway, Shakespeare, Stein and Kaczynski, the Unabomber came out most likely to gain entry to the Ivy League. But there it is. Parents, make sure your kids have lots of pepper spray and padlocks when you ship them off to Dartmouth. You just never know about that freshman year roommate.
It may make you feel better to know that universities generally don’t place much importance on your score on the Analytical portion of the GRE, just Math and Verbal. So if you did well in the other two areas, and sucked on the logic stuff, you’d probably still get in your program of choice.
makes me wistful for the days of AP English when I was pretty much guaranteed an extra 5% if I could write about sex as a parallel for something and be mature about it.