GRE Goodness

As I previously alluded, I’ve signed up for the GREs at the end of next month. As soon as I stopped learning things at work it got exceedingly dull, and I expect it will only get duller if my varied managers don’t carefully cherry-pick interesting assignments for me - which they don’t because they rightfully cherry-pick them all for themselves, as payment for having more stress and rottener work hours.

I snagged the (free) official preparation software and took part of a practice test over lunch; it’s just swell, but it’s all on computer, as is the test nowadays, and somebody decided that ~20 characters would be an appropriate column width for all the reading comprehension passages. Twenty characters (ish)! At that width, every fourth word is hyphenated and it’s impossible to tell where paragraphs start and stop. Slows my reading speed down immensely, and makes it rather difficult to answer questions about things “as described in the third paragraph” since I have to actually scan for breaks in thought.

Everything about that test has been focus-grouped to a fare-thee-well, so what were they thinking? There’s certainly some need to have a test program that will run on minimal hardware, so it can be standardized worldwide, but for $120 bucks a pop you’d think ETS could buy a set of new monitors for their third world test centers and run things at better than 640×800. I mean, geez.

Comments

  1. des wrote:

    ‘Doze only nonsenses; I discard them! My gads ordbog has a credit card sized ‘Doze CD-rom on it, which I can’t use. (Well, there is Wine, but life is short.)

  2. yami wrote:

    I’ve gotten enough funny looks for doing browsing and email with Mozilla on my office machine…

  3. Rana wrote:

    I am soooo glad I took my GREs back in the day of pencil and bubble sheets!
    (Yeah, I have my Luddite moments…)

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*

*