For those looking to attend graduate school, the entrance exams are dreaded things. The long slog of studying that comes with preparing for mammoth tests like the GRE or MCAT can be exhausting intellectually and emotionally, especially when that study time must exist alongside the myriad of papers, projects and other schoolwork one already has to do to excel in college. It gets so frustrating that you begin to wonder whether these tests should matter as much as they do. Shouldn’t a good grade point average be enough to prove one’s worthiness of entering graduate school?
Like most, I am not a fan of standardized testing. These tests can never accurately assess someone’s intelligence 100 percent as everyone is intelligent in different ways, but I do think they serve a sort of necessary evil, at least in theory.
Schools should be a little selective about who gets into graduate school and the like, particularly when dealing with the medical world. Would you want a surgeon who just squeaked by in school to work on your brain? I sure wouldn’t.
My biggest beef with these tests is how general they are. Being an English major with hopes of teaching film and literature at a university, I had to take the GRE. With that in consideration, it is irritating to have to be tested on mathematics when Shakespeare and film theory are more my speed, even if they’re just high school level mathematics. It’s especially irritating because by this point it had been three years since I had taken a math class. None of these concepts were fresh in my mind and now that I am done with the GRE, I never plan on touching trigonometry or logarithms ever again.
I do understand the idea of wanting students to be well-rounded, but when it comes to the entrance exam for graduate school, shouldn’t well-rounded apply to your area of interest? For example, even if you’re an English major with a creative writing concentration, you should be well-versed in literature, poetry, theatre and other related humanities. Whether or not you can comprehend trigonometry is irrelevant in this case.
While there are issues with these tests, I do think there should be some form of graduate entrance exams, and they should be challenging. If anything, they inform the unwary of the hard work and dedication needed to succeed when continuing on in the world of higher education.