Picking a number

Humble apologies for my delayed posting.  I have been running myself ragged doing practice questions for the GRE.  While I am proud to report that I have indeed expanded my vocabulary by 500 new words (albeit archaic, useless ones that I will never utter), the quantitative side is driving me insane.

Two months ago, I was actually excited to study for and sit the GRE.  I know this is an odd way to feel about an exam, but I think many people enjoy the challenge of a brain teaser or an IQ test, which is what I expected this to be similar to. 

Not at all, unfortunately.  Instead of testing intelligence or even simple mathematical ability, the GRE quant section uses chicanery, trickery and slight-of-hand to deceive respectable students from choosing the correct answer.  Such immoral question-setting strategies as mixing up the units, changing the scale of graphs, and ambiguously defining primary-school math terms, litter the practice sets.  I’m going nuts.

I should have twigged earlier.  All of the practice books and online guides (those not sponsored by the testing company, I should clarify) are unrestrained in their harsh criticism of the integrity of the exam.  “It is not a measure of how smart you are”, reassures one.  “You shouldn’t try to learn math – just learn how to beat the test”, announces another. 

How disillusioning.  You may be capable of calculating Fourier transforms and higher-order differential equations, but unless you can remember whether zero is an integer or a natural number, you’re not going to get the score you need.  And there’s only so many three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication sums you can do at sixty seconds per question before you make an error.  In the words of Samuil Shchatunovski, “It is not the job of mathematicians… to do correct arithmetical operations.  It is the job of bank accountants. ”

I don’t feel any smarter at all.  In fact, exactly the opposite.

I heard an interesting fact the other day.  Americans do better on multiple choice questions than any other nationality.  This no longer surprises me; the US education system, from high school to post-grad, seems driven towards equipping students to succeed on these types of questions alone.  As one of the practice books puts it, “The aim is to eliminate four wrong answers, not to calculate one right answer.”  I’m not entirely sure that’s how the real world works, although the next time I’m at Starbuck’s and have to choose from between five cup sizes, I may start humming the Star-Spangled Banner.

Humble apologies again, this time for the rant.  Really, I’m just getting frustrated by my stupid errors, which is a flaw actually worth remedying for the real world.  Sour grapes on my part.  It just annoys me that I know pages upon pages of Sicilian Dragon theory, but I didn’t know that an object’s width can actually be longer than its length.  The former may be more important in general, but not for the next 72 hours.

Or is that 62 hours?  Damn, forgot to carry the one…