Ergative Avenger

I have known many non-linguistics undergrads in linguistics grad programs. A lot will depend on the focus you plan to take with linguistics, many subfields of which are interdisciplinary by nature. If you are thinking of getting into, say, sociolinguistics, then there will already be considerable overlap with the work you've done already in sociology, and you could probably get into a master's program with little additional coursework. On the other hand, if you're interested in studying formal syntax at MIT, you will probably want to bolster your credentials in structural linguistics significantly. Those are just two ends of a broad spectrum of possibilities, and you definitely will not hurt your chances by trying to get a broad exposure to the different fields of linguistics. Good luck.

The author of the article has a point with regard to cultural bias, but the long-winded crowing about "difficult" passages lost me entirely. I'm sorry, but I just did not have any problem with the passages in the article or in the test. I got a very good score on the GRE Verbal, but I do not consider myself to have some kind of unusually strong reading comprehension ability. I am frequently bogged down by literature in my own field. The author suggests that reading passages come with headings that explain the main idea. Sure, let's do it. But then we can't have questions like "What is the title of this passage?" or at least, few of us on this board will ever run into a question that easy due to the adaptive nature of the test. A question like that does nothing to discriminate between students with poor reading comprehension and those with good reading comprehension. Instead, the test will have to ask about the main idea of untitled sub-passages, which ends up with the same "problem" identified by the author, of test questions being difficult and hurting his grad student friends' feelings or whatever. It's also important to note that in scholarly literature, one will often have to understand the main idea of paragraphs within a text, and not every individual paragraph will come with a helpful title. At a certain point, as a scholar, you have to supply some of your own brain power. I did have one beef with the reading comprehension portion, but it had nothing to do with the texts themselves. From doing many practice tests and reading answer explanations, I noticed that incorrect answers were frequently described as containing misrepresentations or oversimplifications of the author's intent. In practice, I often found that all five answer choices were guilty of some degree of misrepresentation or oversimplification, leaving me to guess which one the test-maker wanted. Usually, this was not too difficult. For example, I don't see any grammatical problem with this sentence or, for that matter, any major stylistic problem. All conjoined and compared phrases are in perfect parallel. I guess the problem is supposed to be with the final appositional phrase with two fronted adverbials. The first comma could be replaced with a dash, or "in many cases" could be moved to the end, but otherwise I don't see how this sentence is difficult to understand. It's long. So what? It's a concise and precise statement of the complex relationships between factors bearing on married women's employment. Scholarly writing, by necessity, frequently deals with complex relationships. Writing in simplistic terms as if for a high school audience leads to an oversimplification of the relationships being discussed. That's fine for high schoolers. It's not appropriate for writing aimed at grad students and scholars working in that field, who require detail and accuracy. For that matter, the level of difficulty of a passage is largely irrelevant to a computer adaptive test that reports percentile scores, like the GRE. The intent is to identify a student's relative ability to comprehend scholarly writing, as compared to the total body of test-takers. As long as the test stratifies test-takers into those that do well and those that don't (which means, ideally, less than 1% of test-takers should receive the maximum score), absolute difficulty is irrelevant. If the test is simply made easier, somehow, then everyone will just get higher scores. Well yay, higher test scores are always good, right? At best, the percentile rankings will be unchanged. At worst, the verbal section becomes like the too-easy quantitative section, where it is impossible to score in the 99th percentile, and the test is therefore unable to identify the top 1% of students in that section. To be sure, there are flaws in the GRE. Hopefully, the new test will address some of these, but this article hardly identifies any real flaws. The GRE reading comprehension portion tests the ability to read and understand scholarly literature. All scholarly literature is in someone's subfield. By sheer mathematics, it's unlikely to be in your subfield. (I didn't get any readings in my field, broadly speaking.) Likewise, every text is written from someone's cultural context. There are no culturally neutral texts. I wouldn't have any complaints about reading a text on Indian music, and in fact, many texts drawn from the humanities deal with cultures and historical periods that are likely to be unfamiliar to American test-takers. I would advocate there being more such texts. However, no matter what your culture or academic specialty, the odds are overwhelming that the subject matter is going to be unfamiliar to you. That's part of what makes the GRE a test, rather than a four hour self-esteem booster.

Hey guys, I am also attending Berkeley in fall, for Linguistics. I was hoping to get into a student co-op, but I am not well-positioned on the waiting list so I don't expect that to pan out. I applied for residence in the International House and was offered a spot, but I am leery about that situation for several reasons - mainly the high price and crummy cafeteria food - though I otherwise really don't mind a dormy atmosphere and would rather like the opportunity to meet lots of people since I am pretty social by nature. Still I would like to explore other options while I can. Anyway, I am 29, male, clean, quiet, and respectful of others' belongings and food. If anyone is interested in finding a housemate to get a place somewhere in walking distance of campus, do let me know, as I would be quite interested in discussing the possibility.