Despite years of progress toward equality, discrimination is alive and well. The kind of discrimination I’m talking about, though, isn’t related to gender, race or sexual orientation (although I’m fully convinced that they still play a huge role in our society today). The kind of discrimination I’m talking about is the one created by an institutional norm in applying for graduate schools: the dreaded GRE.
The GRE, or the Graduate Record Examination, for those lucky enough not to have to take it, is like the SAT or ACT all over again except it’s taken after four years of a specialized, narrowly configured education. For English majors, it’s all that math, including algebra and geometry, you haven’t taken since high school. For people in the math and science world, at least half of the test consists of the synonyms and word comparisons you haven’t done in years.
In the next month I’ll be taking the GRE to apply for graduate school. I’ve gotten books and taken classes on preparing for the test, and in my first day in prep class our instructor, Rich, gave us the pep talk about how the test isn’t a reflection of who we are as people (maybe so those who get miserable scores don’t feel like the world has ended), but that it is a way for universities to discriminate between the very smart and barely smart. As Rich told us, “If you’re applying to grad school, you’re smart.”
Attending graduate school is usually to further specialize in a subject. How, then, is a broad, universal test in any way a reflection of how a student will perform in a program focused on one subject, sometimes even on one small aspect within a subject? Universities just need something to disqualify students so their stacks of applications don’t reach the sky.
The GRE helps them sift through the seemingly infinite applications. Students with a number lower than whatever the university has designated are sometimes scrapped (many universities, however, say they just take a closer look at the students whose number isn’t as high as they had hoped).
At Cal State Long Beach only about 20 master’s programs out of seventy-something offered require the GRE. Others require a minimum GPA or some kind of test relating to whatever field a student will be entering, like the GMAT for business school.
Like any other form of discrimination, the test should be abolished. Students should be judged on the quality of their work, not the number attached to some broad test. It would mean a lot of work for admissions people, but it would give talented students who don’t remember that stuff from high school a shot.
Or maybe it’s just me and my hatred for standardized tests.
Lauren Williams is a senior journalism and political science major, the managing editor for the Daily Forty-Niner and a weekly contributor.
