The GREatest Experience Ever

So I took a practice Graduate Record Examination today...

IT WAS BULLSHIT.

I'm so glad I didn't pay for it. This test made me consider if grad school is really worth it. I'm still considering it, but if that's my only way in, I may have to pass.

Before we started, the proctor, A MISTER THEO HILL FROM KAPLAN, told us the GRE was like the SATs on steroids. I was all, "Okay, this shouldn't be so bad. I did fairly well on the SATs." Then he goes ahead and tells us that we won't be needing any calculators because it's "ONLY high school level math" and that we can go ahead and put our calculators under our seats. The math was high school level, alright. But doesn't high school math go up to Pre-Calc or something? Like, a level that you NEED calculators for?!

Here's a problem from the booklet, a problem that probably would have been easy for me if I had been able to use my calculator:

Column A Column B
9(to the seventh) - 9(to the fifth) 9(to the fifth) x 80

a. The quantity in Column A is greater
b. The quantity in Column B is greater
c. The two quantities are equal
d. The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.

See, it's not a hard problem, but I didn't have a calculator nor the time to write everything out and do the corresponding math.

and then, AND THEN:

The verbal part, which I thought would be my niche, turned out to also be gay. There were a lot of analogies and "find the antonym" questions, which should be easy, right? WRONG.

I believe that everyone should understand college-level language, but let's be real: There are a lot of words that not even college-educated people use (unless they're writing a paper and use the good ol' "right-click and find a synonym for this word so I sound a little smarter." Here are some words from the booklet that I couldn't even begin to understand until I went back to my room and looked them up:

Mawkish (adj.) - Sentimental in a weak, insipid way
Temerity (noun) - Foolish or rash boldness
Malediction (noun) - A curse (I actually used my basic linguistic knowledge to guess what it meant, but still: I've never heard anyone say it and I've never read it in a book. Maybe because I don't read a lot of fantasy...)
Fecundity (noun) - The quality of being fertile; productive
Quixotic (adj.) - Extravagantly chivalrous or foolishly idealistic (I'd actually seen this word before on Livejournal, another blog site. It was one of the moods that you could choose from to describe yourself.)
Saturnine (adj.) - Sluggish, gloomy, grave, etc.
This was the one that really killed me: Jejune (adj.) - 1. Not interesting or satisfying 2. Not mature; childish

Bullshit, right? So we're supposed to get our results this coming Thursday. I know this nigga Theo Hill is gonna try to make me sign up and pay for Kaplan's GRE prep. It costs $1,199, but the good news is that he'll give us $100 off. 'Cause that's gonna put such a huge dent in it, you know. Needless to say, I am not about to pay for that and I'm not so sure that I wanna pay the $160 to take the actual test if this is how it's gonna be. I've always hated standardized testing.

When I get my score, I might post it here...you know, so we can all laugh about it. But I might not post it because of how terribly embarrassing it will be. But I will update to say how the result session went and what range my score was in.