the GREs

I took the GREs today (Graduate Record Exams, basically the SATs for grad school). It was sort of an entertaining practice run: I was going to apply for an MS program in computer science, but then discovered that I can take as many graduate classes at Stanford as I like, and up to 18 of those credits (at 3 credits/class) can transfer to a master's program whenever I feel like applying and making the commitment. Good things about this:

1. If you're actually enrolled, you have 5 years to complete the master's. That's just barely possible at one course per quarter (the most I could manage while working); accumulating 6 quarters' worth of credits before enrolling makes that 5 years a lot more feasible.
2. Good grades in actual Stanford graduate classes will weigh much more heavily on a Stanford application than the GREs or anything else.

The GREs were paid for, and I haven't really had time or inclination to really feel prepared, so I figured I should just take them anyway, as a baseline experience. Remember, these are the new GREs, as they just revised the test and deployed the new version in August.

I'm glad I studied what little bit I did, because they are sneaky bastards, those test authors. It's not hard in the usual sense. Just...sneaky.

It's a computerized test, which is actually pretty cool. I imagine I tanked the Analytical Writing section, because I thought it was 30 minutes for both writing questions, and it turned out it was 30 minutes each, so my first answer is probably unacceptably short.

The Verbal stuff seemed pretty easy (shocking!). The Quantitative was harder, but I found that I kept flashing on the answers as I went through, especially as time started to run out. I'm sure it helped that I was taking them as a dry run, with nothing actually at stake. I felt like eventually I was getting a bit into the swing of how those problems are constructed, although for many of them I definitely did not resolve them the elegant way. (One guess which is faster and more reliable: me staring and trying to figure out the clever shortcut, or me typing 5 different things into the on-screen calculator to see which one matches my answer.)

For the Quantitative and Verbal sections, they give you your score at the end. Unfortunately, the scores for the new revision won't be available until November-ish, so they just give you an estimate of how you would have scored on the old test. Memory is hazy on which was which, but it said "720-800" for (I think) the Verbal, and "750-800" for the Quantitative. Doesn't seem too shabby on an 800 scale, and for not studying.

How's that look for a grad school application? The Stanford CS department says:

While there is no minimum requirement for GRE scores, a strong application would include percentiles in the high 90s for the Ph.D. program and scores in the 90th percentile for the MS program.

Okay, so what are the percentiles? Wikipedia's chart agrees with this test prep site:

Scaled score	Verbal Reasoning %	Quantitative Reasoning %
800	99	94
780	99	89
760	99	84
740	99	80
720	98	75
700	97	70
680	96	66
660	94	61

Holy crap! 800 on the Quantitative, a perfect score, is only 94th percentile. That means that 6% of everyone who took the old GRE got a perfect score. 94th percentile for Verbal is all the way down at 660.

No wonder they revised it: that right there is a test that is very seriously out of balance.

(A corollary is that any range they gave me for Quantitative is pretty meaningless, being a range that starts at 84th percentile. Imagine if, on a standard American grade scale, your teacher said "You got somewhere between a B and an A+": no shit, Sherlock, I knew that when I walked out of the exam. The Verbal range, by comparison, says that I would have gotten a 98th percentile and up.)

At any rate, I'm glad I took them. While tricky, they weren't as scary as they might have been, and I still have some of my gift for standardized testing. I have no idea what my actual scores might be, and I'm looking forward to finding out.

[EDIT: If you're curious, it's now adaptive by section rather than by question, so you can jump around and skip questions and go back within each Verbal and Quantitative section, which wasn't possible before.]

testing and tears

1-J had their test scheduled for today, and yesterday they started campaigning for me to delay it. They claimed they had my test, another test, and a Biology project due all today, and the rules said they don't have to have more than two tests in a day. We had a similar rule in college about exams, but of course I don't have the language skills and contextual knowledge to know when the kids are trying to con me--although they usually are. They were genuinely distraught; yesterday I told them I'd think about it, but they should be ready for the test. I said they should talk to the U.T.P., the Unidad Técnica Pedagógica, which is literally something like "Educational Technique Unit," and I translate as "Curriculum Director," because they're the school's academic overlords. A couple girls said they'd do that.

Today they campaigned harder, and of course no one had actually talked to the Curriculum Overlords (perhaps thinking they had a better chance with me alone), so when they came to my classroom, I said, "Okay, let's go talk to the U.T.P., the rest of you hang out here." I don't know the rules of the school very well, it'd be a pain for me to delay the test, and I didn't like the power dynamics of me making the decision--of either giving in to a silly student demand (they knew the test was coming and we prepped for it last week), or of their perceiving an injustice if I remained hard-nosed.

Funny enough, the three students went in to talk to Uberlinda, the Power-That-Is, and when I showed up a few steps later, her assistant Claudia basically blocked the door and asked how she could help, so I had to say "I'm with them" to get in to watch the conversation.

Uberlinda told them they were SOL: that yes, they can only have two tests in a day, and that's all they have, the Biology project is something they're supposed to do at home, well before the day it's due. So we went back to the room and crushed everyone's hopes and started the testing.

The test was two parts, equally weighted: give me the English words for 10 pictures, and then ask me 3 of the 4 questions we learned (things like "What do you do for work?" and "What's your favorite food?". I'm pretty generous by American standards, and I try really hard to help the kids get at least partial credit, by prompting them with initial consonants and stuff. Even so, we had a few bad results and one set of tears, and several requests for a way to raise their grade.

In a school where their learning experience were reasonable (especially if I were creating it), I'd say "tough," but...a lot of these kids already have lousy grades in English, and if they don't keep their grades up, they'll get booted out to another school. I know for a fact that these are smart kids, and most of them aren't any lazier than normal 15-year olds; and I know that between the huge, untracked classes and bad curriculum, their overall English-learning experience is crap.

Maybe they'll succeed under the Chilean system, maybe they won't; but I think I want to help them as much as I can while being fair to everyone and still insisting that they be assessed on what they know.