In which the author, a 54 year old with 30 years in the field of mathematics education, takes the GREs, his first attempt at taking a standardized test in almost 30 years. Here is a list of the other posts in this series:

Part I: It’s Me vs. The Stinkin’ GREs, part I

Part II: Test Day Arrives

Part III: High Security & Writing My Time

Part V: In Which I Experience a Freak-Out

With my brain running on empty after 4 hours of non-stop poking and prodding, I slid my chair back and attempted to stand and flee, but alas, the friendly folks at ProMetric were not having any of it: since this is the age of instant gratification, aided and abetted by the microchip, I would be immediately informed of my scores on the multiple choice section, which would be followed 10 days later by the scores on the written analysis section (which would be carefully analyzed by an experienced educator culled from an ad placed on CraigsList…)

I clicked on the next screen, where two numbers appeared on a blank field:

Verbal Analysis: 168

Quantitative Analysis: 159

Would you like to send your scores to an institution?

I shrugged my shoulders; yes, a 168 on the verbal analysis was not only passable, but pretty damned good, considering the scale goes to 170. The quantitative analysis was 2 points lower than I had scored on the home version, but then again, I hadn’t experienced the freakout that went on at the test center. Looking up the scores in the comfort of my home, I learned that I was in the 97th percentile in verbal analysis, but only 79th percentile for quantitative analysis.

So it became a “good news, bad news” sort of thing, and I’m sure the admissions people would put more weight on the verbal scores that on the math. After all, if I was going to pursue a PhD, wouldn’t it be more important that I can read and comprehend vast amounts of written information, or complete 30 irrelevant math problems in 35 minutes? I clicked “yes” and sent my scores on to CUNY. A few weeks later, my scores on the written section were delivered via email: 5.5 out of 6, which placed me in the 97th percentile once again. When I informed my friend Trisha of this achievement, she called me a “worthless bastard,” as she had “only” gotten a 5 out of 6 on the writing section when she took the GREs a bunch of years ago. Oh, and she’s a professional writer as opposed to hack like me.

Some Reflections on the Nature of Standardized Tests from Someone Who Did Quite Well…

I won’t know if I was accepted into the PhD program of my choice, and if this entire process was a waste of time and money, so be it. Here’s what I did learn from taking the GREs, and I’m sure nothing about what I’m about to say is going to surprise you.

Standardized Tests Are Mindless Bullcrap (and probably worse…)

The current state of standardized testing…

There, I’ve said it, and now I’ll tell you why. As someone who is interested in mathematics and believes statistics can be a helpful tool to assess the proficiency and understanding on a mass scale, it is important to understand that for a test to be useful it has to be both valid and reliable. It has to actually assess what it says it will assess, and it has to do it in a way that the results will be pretty much the same no matter how many times it is conducted, free from outside influences. As a way to measure a group of people, it is probably valid and reliable, because the outside factors can be distributed over the many test takers. To get a portrait of an individual, it is clearly flawed, and probably no better than the 19th century practice of phrenology.

What can a pediatrician teach us about the usefulness of standardized testing?

From here, I’ll have to swerve a little bit to discuss the work of one of my idols, T. Berry Brazelton, whom I admire very much (except for the diaper commercial he made several years back…) In 1973, Brazelton released the “The Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale,” better known as the NBAS. It was a marked departure from previous tools for assessing newborns, as it was based on “capabilities” rather than “deficits.” The two main factors in performing a NBAS was that the baby had to be in “optimal state” and that the goal was to elicit the “best performance possible.”

“Optimal state,” meant that the baby being examined had to be calm and attentive; it made no sense to assess an infant who was “disorganized” because, as you can imagine, the data would not be valid. Brazelton’s goal was to obtain a true representation of what the infant is capable of doing, and this could only be done when the students are in an “optimal state.”

The second major philosophical basis for the NBAS was obtaining the best performance possible. That is, instead of giving the infant a single task and recording the result, the NBAS specifies that the subject be given the same task over and over again, and recording only the best performance.  According to the Brazelton Institute website, the goal of the NBAS is as follows:

By the end of the exam, the examiner has developed a vibrant portrait of the newborn, which can be used to tailor caregiving to the baby’s specific physical needs and behavioral style.

If we substitute the word “newborn” and “baby” for “student,” “caregiving” with “teaching” and  “physical” with “academic,” we have the basis of what a “good” assessment should actually do.

Can we really say that our assessment systems are designed to bring out “best performance” based on a subject’s “optimal state?” I think you’ll agree that this far from what our current standardized tests are designed to do: instead of creating assessments designed to accommodate each student’s individual backgrounds (which is not all that hard to do, given the current state of technology), we are forced to to contend with a “one size fits all” system that treats every student the same, irrespective of the student’s individual profile.

One of these students may end up in your classroom. Should he or she be given a standardized test after 6 months?

The result is that we have kids who come from clearly divergent backgrounds who are required to take the exact same exam. Do you have a 12 year old student who arrived in the US less than a year ago from a small town in Ghana and who is in his first year of education? Give him the test! Do you have a student who clearly suffers from untreated behavioral issues, including ADHD? Give her the test! Do you have a student who has been living in a homeless shelter for the past 2 years and has no place to study? Give him the test! Do you have a student who has a chronic illness that prevents her from attending school on a regular basis? Give her the test!

I can’t say whether my GRE score is representative of when I was in an “optimal state” and if it elicited my “best performance.” It was less a fair assessment of my actually skills and knowledge and more an indication of how I could sustain focus and attention while answering 4 hours worth of decontextualized and largely irrelevant questions. There must be better ways to find out what people know in order to judge their fitness, whether that be as a teacher or a learner. The current system gives us crappo information, devoid of any validity or reliability. Is this the best we can do in the 21st century?

In which the author, a 54 year old with 30 years in the field of mathematics education, takes the GREs, his first attempt at taking a standardized test in almost 30 years. Here is a list of the other posts in this series:

Part I: It’s Me vs. The Stinkin’ GREs, part I

Part II: Test Day Arrives

Part III: High Security & Writing My Time

Part V: GRE’s, The Final Score, Reflections on BS….

 After a 20 minute break, I appeared at the administrator’s desk, showed my identification and signed my name into the log book. I sat down at the computer, knowing that this was the homestretch, and barring some kind of disaster, it might be the last time I would have to take one of these evaluations.

I counted down the seconds, and was directed to yet another section that would assess my verbal skills. The first passage appeared, and I immediately grew concerned: this did not look anything like the essays I saw in the first part of the exam. In fact, this was far denser and even more obscure than anything I had ever read (and you should know that I find the novels of Thomas Pynchon quite enjoyable.) For a moment I thought the computer program had developed a glitch and was now going through the licensing requirements to become a notary in Iceland, such was the foreign nature of this text. I gritted my teeth, calmed myself down and after 3 or 4 readings, I was able to fathom quite a bit of what the passage was actually saying. As I moved through what I believed to be the final verbal tasks, I grew confident, especially because the timer seemed to be clicking off at a slower pace. I finished with so much time left that I returned to some of the previous questions (I had noted their number on the blank booklet besides me) and made some touch-ups.

Research reveals that relativity applies to both gravitational fields AND standardized testing!

Shaking out my hands and rubbing my eyes during the next 2 minute break, I was caught unaware that the computer was actually keeping track of my work, and adjusting the level of  difficulty as I moved from section to section. Such was my shock when I entered the final quantitative section and encountered some very, very difficult math problems. The problem was not that the questions were complicated; they seemed almost routine and uninteresting. The issue was that arriving at a solution in just under the allotted minute or so was daunting. I plunged into the exam, taking what I thought was about a minute to solve each problem, and soldiered on.

To my dismay, my pace was not nearly fast enough: I became so engaged in one problem that I stuck with it for 5 minutes, fully ignoring the implications of how this would affect my ability to complete the next 20. With 10 minutes to go in a 35 minute exam, I still had not finished half of the exam. Panic set in.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN I HAVE 3 MORE MINUTES TO ANSWER 10 MORE QUESTIONS!!!

I started by clicking through the rest of the questions: I chose which ones I knew I could answer almost immediately, and skipped those which looked to be too intensive. Some were quite familiar and I knew I could have solved them had I seen them sooner, but this was not a luxury afforded to me. I had screwed up the timing, and now I had to get some traction. At one point I grew so frustrated that I actually slammed my palms on the keyboard and shut my eyes. In a moment of clarity, I realized what was happening: I was experiencing “math anxiety,” and as a self-taught expert on this subject, shouldn’t I know what to do?

I thought fast: CALM DOWN ran through my head. I looked up at the countdown, which showed I had less than 8 minutes to assess and answer a dozen more problems. I clicked through, doing as many as I could in the shortest amount of time, and as the test ended, I knew that I had messed up royally. I shuddered, but consoled myself in the knowledge that at least I was “done.”

But I was not done! Because they were not through with me yet. In complete disbelief, I watched as the screen informed me that I had another 2 minute break before the final section of the exam. ARE YOU F•CKING KIDDING ME! I’VE WRITTEN TWO ESSAYS AND ANSWERED DOZENS OF INANE AND STUPID QUESTIONS! HOW MUCH MORE COULD YOU POSSIBLY WANT TO KNOW?

What the old, white guy really thinks of taking the GREs the newfangled way….

Oh, how tempted I was to stop it right there and walk out. Yet I knew that if I could just hold on for the next half hour, it would all be over. I flexed my shoulders, rubbed my eyes for the last time, and labored on. I read more tedious passages, completed more mad-lib like sentences, clicked on more “best describes….” answers, and even saved enough time in the end to go fix a few questions that I knew had not been answered well. Using every last second of time, and every last iota of willpower & brainpower, I stumbled through to the end.

Done. Fini.

Next: in which I get my numbers (or do they get me?)

In which the author, a 54 year old with 30 years in the field of mathematics education, takes the GREs, his first attempt at taking a standardized test in almost 30 years. Here is a list of the other posts in this series:

Part I: It’s Me vs. The Stinkin’ GREs, part I

Part II: Test Day Arrives

Part IV: In Which I Experience a Freak-Out

Part V: GRE’s, The Final Score, Reflections on BS….

 Before entering the “testing room,” I had to perform the equivalent of a soft-core video striptease: I stood in front of a video camera while the “associate” called on me to pull out my front pockets, as well as poke two fingers into the little “pocket within a pocket” in my denims. I was then asked to turn around and place my palms into my back pockets; I then had to pull up the cuffs on my jeans and, as if this were not enough, I had a metal-detecting wand waved between my arms and legs. As I finished my performance, I wondered what kind of perv was buying up copies of these files off the “Deep Web.”

“Is that a calculator, or are you just happy to see me?”

Finally cleared, I was escorted into the “testing room,” where I was placed in front of a computer setup that looked like it had been built in Michael Dell’s basement: an old-style black CPU tower rested next to a small LCD monitor, supplemented by a flimsy keyboard and mouse.  Because I stand a steady 6 feet tall soaking wet, I had to hunch down to get a good view of the monitor: neither the chair or the desk or the monitor was adjustable, so it was up to me to crane my neck down and forward to see properly.

The “ProMetric” Testing Computer setup, circa 2014….

After properly identifying myself, and clicking on a few questions about my background (helllllloooooo, doesn’t anybody at Prometric know about stereotype threat?), I proceeded to the first section of the exam, which involved writing two “analytic” essays: in the first, I would be asked to “analyze an issue,” while in the second, I would be asked the “analyze an argument.” I had looked a the sample questions on the GRE website, as well as the scored answers, and I felt fully confident that I could knock both of these out of the ballpark: after all, I love to write and I love to argue, so what’s not to love about being tested on my ability to argue by writing?

The “analyze an issue” question seemed to be straight out of a pseudo-intellectualized beauty pageant. I am sworn to secrecy about the exact wording of the question, but it wasn’t awfully different from the samples provided, which included “A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college,” and “as people rely more and more on technology to solve problems, the ability of humans to think for themselves will surely deteriorate.” My only issue was coming up with good examples: for my particular essay, I would need four of them, and with the vast amounts of random knowledge found on my personal hard drive, it was going to be tough to pick and choose just what those four examples would be. I jotted a few notes on the cover of my workbook, and set about to impress my judges.

Are you f•cking kidding me?

Unfortunately, my ability to compose this impressive masterwork was seriously impeded by the hardware provided,  which was not a lot different from knitting a scarf using a set of curtain rods. It took some time to master the bulky old-school “dented cube” keyboard provided, which would not stay still as I banged out my composition. The contraption rested at an uncomfortable angle, hampering both my typing speed and accuracy. Desperate for leverage, I pulled the keyboard closer to the front of the desk, which meant I had to push my seat backwards. That, in turn, brought me further away from the monitor; to get a better view, I grasped the monitor with both hands and pulled it towards me.  Big mistake: to my chagrin, the screen with my essay-in-progress suddenly blacked out. I groaned and turned to find a proctor, waving my hand in the air, which was useless, as the associates were busy making more videos of the other hapless subjects.

To me relief, the screen flickered to life after a few seconds and I continued on my first essay. As I said, for security reasons I can’t actually state the topic of the question, but I will say this: my examples included John Dryden, Louis Armstrong, Dodo Marmarosa and Gregor Mendel. Full disclosure: the only reason I know anything about John Dryden is because I read a paragraph about him on one of the GRE sample tests. I guess it does pay to practice!

With my issue analysis out of the way (I actually changed one last word in the final 10 seconds, according to the helpful countdown clock which appears on the top right corner of the screen), I was permitted a 2 minute break to rub my eyes, crack my knuckles and meditate on the fact that I still had 3 more hours of this nonsense to go.

Pass the amphetamines, would you please?

Now that my writing chops were into full swing, I nestled down with my keyboard and screen to tackle the second essay, where I was asked to “analyze an argument.” Again, the helpful people at ETS provided me with a few topics to preview before the exam. Here’s one of them, verbatim:

In surveys Mason City residents rank water sports (swimming, boating and fishing) among their favorite recreational activities. The Mason River flowing through the city is rarely used for these pursuits, however, and the city park department devotes little of its budget to maintaining riverside recreational facilities. For years there have been complaints from residents about the quality of the river’s water and the river’s smell. In response, the state has recently announced plans to clean up Mason River. Use of the river for water sports is therefore sure to increase. The city government should for that reason devote more money in this year’s budget to riverside recreational facilities.

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on the assumptions and what the implications are if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

It was as if my last 40 years of writing had prepared me for this very moment: since the time I was able to lick a postage stamp, I had never shied away from making my views known to the public. My missives usually appeared in our hometown paper, The New York Times, on topics ranging from the promiscuity of Donald Trump to a half-serious proposal to set up a student stock exchange (that actually appeared on the editorial page alongside Edward Teller and Anna Quinlan.) Whatever the plans were for Mason City, I was ready to have my say.

I surveyed my essay topic, and wielding my analytic cutlass, hacked away at every statement made in the proposal, whether it was questioning the sample size of a statistic to decrying the political and economic philosophy of the author. I delighted in the derision I felt for anybody who would be remotely convinced that the proposition could in any way be valid, and by the end of my 30 minutes, I was basking in my own smart-aleckness, even affixing a nickname to the hapless residents of the burg where this essay took place (hint: remember the Scottish band from the 70’s called the “____  _____ Rollers?”

For me, the writing portion of the GREs bore a lot of similarities to the swimsuit competition: everybody else probably had the same endowment, but I just knew how to flaunt it.

Next: in which panic truly sets in….

In which the author, a 54 year old with 30 years in the field of mathematics education, takes the GREs, his first attempt at taking a standardized test in almost 30 years. Here is a list of the other posts in this series:

Part I: It’s Me vs. The Stinkin’ GREs, part I

Part III: High Security & Writing My Time

Part IV: In Which I Experience a Freak-Out

Part V: GRE’s, The Final Score, Reflections on BS….

The day of the test arrived: it was a sunny Friday and after a decent night’s sleep and a cup of hot joe to get me going, I jumped on the subway at waht was for me an unreasonably early hour, and arrived at the test center which was housed in a nondescript office building in downtown Brooklyn. I rode the elevator up to the floor, arriving promptly at 8:30 am, was buzzed into the test center.

The ETS, which administers the GRE, sends a very stern warning to all  test takers on its website, which includes the following:

Do not bring cell phones, smartphones (e.g., BlackBerry® or iPhone® devices), PDAs, digital watches, and other electronic, recording, listening or photographic devices into the test center. If you do, you will be dismissed from the test, your test fees will be forfeited and your scores will be canceled even if dismissal is not enforced on the day of the test. 

(red lettering is mine)

Yeah, this would come in real handy….

What was I to do, hide my phone in the park under a tree and hope it would be there when I got back? I know that there are corner stores in NYC where high school students can pay a couple of bucks to “park” their phones for the day, but I had no idea where to find one. C’mon, we’re all adults here, and really, do you think I would be so audacious as to take a cell phone out during an exam to look up an answer? Even if I did have one in my pocket, were they going to do a “pat down” on me? What about my shoulder bag, in which I carry things like medication and subway reading? All of this seemed unwarranted and downright insulting.

Lucky for me, I had the “wisdom” to look up the actual test administration company, which goes by the name of Prometric. Prometric, as it turns out, has been subcontracted by ETS to administer the computerized form of the GRE and their online video answered my questions and calmed my nerves somewhat. On the upside, I would be given a locker and key to store my personal goods; on the downside, I would have to be humiliated into the equivalent of a full body scan to enter the “testing area.” This would include making a video turning out my pockets, lifting up my pant cuffs, being scanned by a “wand” and standing on one leg and whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown.” I’m exaggerating the last part, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.

More fun than you can shake a stick at: Prometric will be your tester…

But what did surprise me was this: after stowing my stuff, I was presented with a “non-disclosure” form in which I had to acknowledge that I was not previously informed of the content on the test, and that I would not disclose it to anyone. Furthermore, I had to attest to the fact that I have not accepted aid during the test (this is before the test, mind you.) If that wasn’t bad enough, I had to copy a statement of about 75 words in my own handwriting (mandatory “cursive,” by the way; printing was not allowed.) Now I haven’t written anything in cursive beyond my signature for years, and I’m sure that for many people this was going to be the most challenging part of their time at Prometric.  Just to make things more interesting, there were no desks available to practice good handwriting posture: you either had to balance the clipboard on your lap or attempt this feat standing up.

With all this paperwork out of the way, I took my seat in the “pre-testing” area and observed other people as they strode up to the administrators’ desks, submitted their official ID cards and made their videos. The population definitely skewed to the younger set, and since Prometric administers every kind of test imaginable (including the National Certification Program for Construction Code Inspectors and Nursing Home Nurse Aide Certification exams) it was fun practicing my stereotyping skills to imagine who was taking what test.  That cute Asian girl sitting next to me? Maybe the “American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery” licensing exam? That dude with the bleached blond hair was definitely doing the SWIFTNet Security Officer test, right? In the battles between humans and the Testing-Industrial Complex, it appears that testing definitely has the edge.

Next part: in which I summon the ghost of Dodo Marmarosa…

In which the author, a 54 year old with 30 years in the field of mathematics education, takes the GREs, his first attempt at taking a standardized test in almost 30 years. Here is a list of the other posts in this series:

Part II: Test Day Arrives

Part III: High Security & Writing My Time

Part IV: In Which I Experience a Freak-Out

Part V: GRE’s, The Final Score: Reflections on the Meaning of BS…

For some odd reason, I have decided to take yet another turn in my professional life that I hope will eventually lead to something called a “Ph.D.” which, from my cursory knowledge of Latin, means “Doctor of Philosophy.” This is perfect for someone like me, who tends to fein ignorance of the day to day practicalities of living to pursue “a higher calling.” There was only one program I was interested in, and I decided to apply after meeting one of the faculty members at a conference, with whom I developed a very nice rapport over fractions (well, what else would it be?)

My Inspiration: Dr. Quincy Adams Wagstaff, Ph.D.

In mid-December I sat down to fill out the online application form, which included the usual information (academic transcripts from my undergraduate and graduate schools, three personal recommendations, a 32,000 character essay and other such formalities, including a $175 application fee), when I encountered an unusual request:

The Graduate Record Exams was mandatory in order to apply for the program.

I immediately emailed the admissions office, explaining that perhaps my record of 30 years in education, the honors I received for my masters’ work in the mid-1990’s, as well as a record of numerous professional publications in major teaching journals, would obviate the need to take an exam, especially in light of the fact that I was applying to the education department, and we all know what educational professionals think of standardized tests.

I was wrong. Not only did I have to take the exam, I had to get my scores in immediately, if not sooner. This required hunting for an examination center posthaste within a 10 miles radius. This didn’t prove too hard, as NYC apparently has a lot of people who need to be tested in a standardized way (which I’ll elucidate on in a later post.) I plopped down another $180 (was all of graduate school going to be this expensive?) and got a date for the last week in January. It was the only open time available, and I convinced the admissions officer to accept that my scores a few weeks past the deadline by pointing out that the former city councilman in my district is now the mayor of our fair city (as you might have guessed, I am applying to the Graduate Center at the City University of New York , a.k.a. “CUNY.”)

I have not taken a standardized test in many a year; in fact, the last time I took one was to get my New York State Teaching License, which was more than 3 presidents ago. I did not prepare at all for those tests, because they were more along the lines of “general knowledge” exams, and if there’s one thing I have a lot of, it is “general knowledge” (I guess all those years of watching “Jeopardy!” finally paid off.)  In fact, I would go as far as to say that I am pretty much educated beyond my actual intelligence, which means, of course, that I aced each exam without breaking a sweat.

But the GREs were going to be different: this was an exam that would ask a lot more than how to simplify a few fractions or pick out which was not the most appropriate response to a student whose pet wolverine consumed his homework. Nay, these were going to be long and intricate reading passages which demanding my best intertextual hermeneutical analyses. The math portion would require lightning speed computation, estimation and logic skills. This would surely push me to the limits of my smarts, especially in light of the fact that the computerized versions of these tests feature “adaptive” technology, which meant that the questions would get harder as I trudged through the test. I downloaded the helpful test simulation software provided by the College Board and sat down after eating dinner one evening to have a look at what this might be like.

They were hard. Mondo hard. Like, Teen Championship Jeopardy! hard. The reading passages were about very obscure subjects featuring complex details and discussed time periods and events that had been used as the plot lines for many remaindered books found at the local Goodwill. The math problems appeared extraordinarily ambiguous and hypothetical, and the idea of solving 25 of these in 35 minutes appeared to be nothing short of tortuous. I should also note that when I meant by “eating dinner” consisted of consuming 3 glasses of badass red wine, a half-pot of roast chicken with potatoes, and a side of massaged kale.

Perhaps my brain was more focused on digesting the sea of alcohol, protein, carbohydrates and lipids that were sloshing away in my stomach.

Maybe I need to take this a little more seriously.

About 2 weeks before the test date, I decided to take a few hours away from my Sunday and actually go through a timed exam. There’s a lot of traffic that goes through my apartment on any given Sunday, between my girlfriend completing household chores and her daughter doing whatever it is a 19 year old does on an extended college break does (which included catching up on situation comedies.)

The endeavor took up the better part of my day, which was interrupted by frequent trips to the refrigerator and bathroom, intervals of eye rubbing and head scratching, and finally, to help relieve some of the boredom, five fingers of 18 year old Scotch whiskey, straight up. I managed to pull off a 160 on the verbal and a 161 on the math, which, pegging me at the top 87%, would put me well on the way to admission. I figured having fewer disruptions and taking the test earlier in the day would work to my advantage, although not having a glass of whiskey to keep me company would definitely hamper my enthusiasm.

My trusty “study buddy”

A week before the big day, I took another stab at any pretense of “preparing,” which consisted of beginning another endless practice test with its tedious passages on everything from a 16th century novelist (whose name would come in handy during the actual exam) to the phenomenon of icebergs that somehow found themselves melting away far from home. The prospect of more hours prepping for what was surely going to be 12 miles of bad road was not particularly inspiring, so I threw caution to the wind and focusing instead on kneading the perfect pizza crust for dinner. My only hope was a good night’s sleep followed by a liberal dose of both caffeine and egg protein in the morning.