I’m not sure how things will play out, but I’m getting ready to apply to graduate schools with the goal of being enrolled in fall of 2004. I’m not even completely clear on the degree that I’m seeking, whether it will be a masters (again!) or a doctorate, but I’m gathering information about programs right now, and I took the GRE general exam yesterday.

Last time I took the GRE was 10 years ago, and it had changed quite a bit. For starters, the analytical section, which used to be populated with complicated mental puzzles that have to do with crop rotations and who’s sitting next to whom at a dinner party, was replaced by a couple of timed essays. I think that’s been the trend during the last decade, to introduce a written segment into major exams like the SAT and GRE.

The first essay gave you two quotes and you needed to pick one to write a response to. The one I chose went something like “In any academic area or professional field, it is just as important to recognize the limits of our knowledge and understanding as it is to acquire new facts and information.” I used remembered approximated quotes from Wendell Berry and R. J. Neuhaus in my answer.

The second essay was argument analysis and I had to respond to the following argument:

Humans arrived in the Kaliko Islands about 7,000 years ago, and within 3,000 years most of the large mammal species that had lived in the forests of the Kaliko Islands had become extinct. Yet humans cannot have been a factor in the species’ extinctions, because there is no evidence that the humans had any significant contact with the mammals. Further, archaeologists have discovered numerous sites where the bones of fish had been discarded, but they found no such areas containing the bones of large mammals, so the humans cannot have hunted the mammals. Therefore, some climate change or other environmental factor must have caused the species’ extinctions.

That was pretty easy, as there were real problems with the argument.

The rest of the exam was composed to a math (quantitative) section, a verbal section, and then another math section. The nature of the last section is random, and it was my luck to get more math. I don’t remember a single theorem for solving anything. No, not even that easy one that allows you to determine the third side of an isosceles triangle. I made some educated guesses on all 60 questions I encountered and managed to still score a 560 out of 800. That’s 5 points higher than the average humanities test-taker. The average engineering test-taker scores a 720 on the quantitative…. On the verbal area I did fine: the average humanities score was 540, and I got 750.

The harder exam will be the GRE subject exam for literature. Harder mainly because it changes over time and during the last decade it’s moved away from the traditional canonical literature and a good portion of it now tests on knowledge of 20th century literature, especially that of the ‘marginalized’ demographic. Last time I took that exam I did well enough, placing somewhere in the 90th percentile, but I think it will be more difficult now. Typically one is supposed to study by reading through a recent edition of the Norton Anthology of English and World Literature anthologies, but I’m not sure whether I’m going to have the space to do that till after school’s out. Maybe I can spend all my waking moments in December trying to nail some of that stuff down.

The hard part will be figuring out where to apply.