I was looking over a GRE practice test today (don’t ask me why — reading things is what I do), and I was surprised that some of the answers were obviously wrong or utterly ambiguous.
People get admitted to grad school with this?
There was a question specifically about the skin’s defenses against bacterial invasion where the whole point of the passage is leading up to summarizing a specific method the skin uses to defend against pathogens, and the answer (which was wrong) was that the passage was a summary of various methods the skin uses to defend against infection.
Well no — there were “various methods” listed, but the whole point of the passage was to tell the reader about this specific one in more detail than the others — that’s why it took up nearly 2/3 of the entire citation.
My guess is that the writer of the question had read the entire piece, but only pulled this portion, and that the the piece in toto was in fact about the various methods the skin uses to repel invaders — but not the bit they pulled. Which very much was not about what the “answer” claimed.
No offense intended to any friends or SOs who went that direction, but glad I didn’t walk that path, into academia. I simply could not deal with that shit.
When you’re smarter than the examiner, the examination should be abandoned for something more appropriate.
I scored in the top couple percent on the real GRE, and I noticed a lot of bullcrap like that. I’m good at taking tests because I’m good at guessing what the test-creators want even when what they want is nonsense, but my impression was the same as yours — this thing that’s basically the SAT beefed up a bit actually determines who gets into grad schools? I’d much rather see interviews by professors who can’t be bluffed, but grad school has basically become an assembly line operation to turn out underpaid adjuncts who need to work at Micky D’s to get enough to live on after being paid piece-work for a couple of classes per semester, so I suspect the actual professors can’t be bothered, it would interrupt their “research” naps and we can’t have that.
I tend to be good at tests like the GRE too, both because like you I’m good at guessing the intentions of the question-formulators and in that field I can just play. Nothing to do with me. Just born that way, I think, and then reinforced with a bit of reading.
But I’d naively assumed that the GRE would’ve been at a different level, with better and more well-formulated questions.
A similar experience of disillusionment occurred when I was younger. Then, I thought Ivy League students must surely be some different, much more sapient species (me being from rural North Florida), but when I got to knew a few it turned out many of them were as dumb as turnips.