Now more than ever, standardized testing has faced an existential demise. Once hegemonic in its usage, standardized tests such as the GRE are finally being dropped from college department admissions requirements. And while the private Educational Testing Service (ETS), which runs the GRE, might be trying to convince the general public of the benefits of standardized testing to keep itself afloat, I’m here to tell you that it’s time to let it sink. Graduate admissions programs gain nothing from GRE requirements, and it’s time for universities to let go of the GRE for good.
It is clear to anyone studying for the GRE that its content is academically useless. The quantitative section is a painful recreation of high school math, forcing most undergraduates to conjure up years of now-forgotten math education in the span of mere months. The verbal section, likewise, is an idiotic attempt at getting applicants to either read horrifically easy passages or learn the abstract definitions of terms like “maladroit” and “quiescent.” The essays, perhaps the most redeemable aspect of the GRE, still function under the premise that, somehow, 30 minutes of writing will magically showcase an applicant’s analytical skills.
If graduate school is supposed to foster research creativity and critical thinking, then the GRE is the perfect testament against it. As the 2021 Princeton GRE Test Prep states right on page two, “the GRE assesses how well you will take the GRE.” Much like the traumatic SAT and ACT we all took back in high school, the GRE does nothing but serve as an educational time waster. Maybe academia is a sham after all, considering that many universities, including NC State, have to rely on an useless test to measure our academic worth.
Let it be clear that I will be fair in my argument and say that there are a few benefits to standardized testing — as limp as they are. In an ideal setting, the GRE is a catch-all test for graduate admissions programs to know the academic background of students,— that is, if we ignore the fact that at no point whatsoever do undergraduate programs teach students GRE content.
Likewise, for careers that require a license, such as medical doctors, standardized testing makes sense. After all, you wouldn’t want your local physician to run diagnoses on outdated information. But most graduate programs are not trying to make you a physician, and besides, career-specific tests like USMLE exist for a reason.
The bigger slap in the face, however, is ETS’ “uncompromising commitment to equity and fairness.” Standardized testing, as we all know, is inherently unforgiving to any test-taker with a mental illness. Sprinkle in the daily stressors of adult life, such as work and undergraduate school, and graduate school feels less like your average application and more like a dance with death.
This discrepancy is even more obvious considering marginalized and lower-class students tend to fare worse in standardized testing due to a lack of educational resources. After all, a bloated SAT clone is nothing more than a Band-Aid trying to seal the gaping wounds economic inequality has inflicted on both marginalized communities and the current U.S. education system. If ETS really cared for equity and fairness, then it would start pressuring legislators for nationwide educational reform and bury the GRE deep underground.
And perhaps there was a time where I thought of graduate education — or university life, for that matter — as different, as more caring and liberating. But like all things, higher education does not exist in an utopian bubble, and the GRE continues to haunt universities like a ghost in dire need of an exorcism. Watching my peers, whom I know to be talented and love dearly, constantly crank out money to test preps only to feel barely average has made me cynical, but not hopeless. After all, in the aftermath of Betsy DeVos’ incompetent legacy, the sky’s the limit on our educational reforms.
With the GRE requirement already being optional this year due to COVID-19, NC State — and all universities for that matter — would do great to completely remove the GRE requirement from all graduate admissions requirements. Literally no one asked for the rotting corpse of the SAT to be putridly revived for higher education, and it’s safe to say that no one in the future will either.
