canberra
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Posts posted by canberra
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Make sure the LORs refer to actual work/projects you have done. Bland statements such as, "S/he is proactive and takes initiatives" are useless compared to a statement such as, "When confronted with such-and-such a problem, s/he did such-and-such a thing without being told."
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There is nothing wrong with that passage. In my opinion, it reads very well. Do the commas confuse you? I suppose the last few words could have said something to the effect of "in many cases, the only women employers would previously hire." What is your criticism here? How would you have written the passage?
It is not a passage but a single sentence! But it is so long that you mistook it for a passage, which kind of proves the point.
I think the author's already done a good enough job of re-working the sentence:
In the 20th century, more married women had jobs because they needed the money – not just because domestic appliances freed up their time. Also, employers used to only hire single women, but their supply was cut by high marriage rates.
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But they have to use "boring" and "dry" things like technical terms and precise definitions
The sentence below from the GRE sample passage is not a definition, but I would hardly say it is written with any degree of precision.
The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century
had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women
than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available
pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire.
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If you can prove your overwhelming commitment in your desired subject areas (eg work, internships etc), that can help a lot.
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Also, a lot of academics is about reading VERY, VERY, VERY dry material. It isn't putting your feet up, drinking a beer and reading Stephen King's latest door-stop 450-page short story.
There's no law that says academic reading material has to be dry. Universities are places of learning, where we explore new and exciting things. It's the faculty who don't feel the excitement, who write in a dry manner.
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I expect to have to put forth the effort to interpret the research.
You're absolutely right. You should be putting in effort to interpret the research, not the scholar’s writing.
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I'm embarking upon GRE preparation and will be registering to take the revised version in August, because I don't feel I have enough time to prepare for the old test. (Technically, plenty of time exists between now and the end of July, but the majority of that time is already heavily accounted for).
Now, for the dumb questions
1) Can you step outside and smoke during your break? My guess was no, but I distinctly recall being allowed a smoke break while taking the ACT, so I guess it doesn't hurt to ask.
2) If you request disability accommodations, is that information communicated in any way to the graduate programs when your scores are sent? My guess is no, but I'm reluctant to request accommodations if it could appear as though I were trying to "cheat" my way to a better score.
The bigger issue is whether smoking outside (ie in a public place) is permitted in the country in which you are taking the test.
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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.
Well, if all the answer choices were guilty of some degree of misrepresentation or oversimplification, obviously even the correct answer was badly written too. The writing should be should be so clear that you should not have to guess. Further you should be thinking about what the author of a passage wants you to understand, rather than what the test-maker thinks you should understand . If there's a difference between what the author says, and what the test-maker thinks the author is saying, then clearly there''s a problem. Unless the author is the one vetting his own passage questions/answers when the test is being created, we have no way of knowing whether the test-maker is in synch with what the author is saying in the passage.
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?
That's the problem with percentile based tests. To make the test supremely difficult, you could just have one long and complex passage comprising a single sentence, containing multiple strands of thought with no punctuation marks. There certainly will be a few people who will succeed in this test. Does this mean everybody else can't read and comprehend as well?
The aim of scholars should be for them to have their ideas and theories contested and debated. There should be no confusion about what they're saying but the reality is that there is confusion. Instead of arguing about the ideas, in the passages we argue about "did the scholar mean this, or did the scholar mean that?"
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"Once upon a time, there was a dude who did some research on beings that can't be seen without a microscope and found out that there was a link between temperature and iron levels."
Your line actually explains the point of the passage far better, and enables the reader to comprehend far more quickly! The explanation of Salmonella etc can follow, but in essence, your sentence is really what the passage is about. And your use of "once upon a time" means that it's definitely not boring.
It's not 'scholarly writing' but it gets the point across in a fun way. What's the problem?
I would bet that far more people would understand your line in a few seconds, compared to muddling through the GRE passage wondering what on earth the main point is.
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Knowing the definition of "genus" is actually not important to understanding the passage (whereas in a passage about cladistics or speciation or something like that, it might be). The point of the sentence that includes the word "genus" has nothing to do with what a genus is;
Why use the word 'genus' at all then? There seems to be absolutely no editing that happens with these passages.
The debate apart, the premise of the 'flawed GRE' article is that the reader's ability to comprehend partly depends on the quality of writing.
I really, really, really don't see anything wrong with that.
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Use Google Chrome as your browser, and then add-on the dictionary extension. When you come across a word you don't know, you just have to highlight the word and click on the dictionary icon in the URL window, and you get the meaning. That way, you will also learn words while surfing the web.
- liverpoolfc and bluejay16
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I didn't find the passages in the GRE very convoluted or hard to follow, but that was just my personal opinion. And I think the point is well made that the passages should be quite dense, as that is the norm in academic writing- maximizing the information with a minimum amount of text.
You may find the passages easy to follow but the reality is that many people find them very difficult. This means the fault lies with the writer, not just with the readers.
Moreover, I would hardly say the following sentence maximizes information with minimum amount of text.
“The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire.”
I am of the opinion that bold, italics and underlines for emphasis have no place in scholarly writing... Just as they haven't found a place in popular writing. The idea is that you should be able to drive home your point via word choice and sentence structure without the need to resort to such glaring techniques as bold, italics, and underlines in the body of your work.
The question isn't whether something has a place in scholarly writing or not. The question is, does the writing help make life easier for the reader? If bold, underline etc help the reader, why should they not be used? Who made up the rules that scholarly writing should be not include the use of wordprocessing features (bold, italics etc)? Why can't we question these rules, given that they seem to come from ancient times when scholars didn't have computers?
The only reason I can think of is insecurity. 'Scholars' don't want others to think that because their writing is easy to understand, the scholar is really not very intelligent.
The use of headings was also mentioned, but the GRE passages really aren't long enough to necessitate headings, in my opinion.
If a headline helps make life easier for the reader, why not?
- Teelee, chaussettes and Phil Sparrow
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This article is a terrible example of the clear writing the author so wishes we would all create. It's full of strange digressions (such as the salaries of bankers), and the author is using the GRE as a vehicle for a broader complaint about academic writing styles that really has nothing to do with what the GRE should test.
Whether or not we ought to write accessibly (we ought), the GRE should test the ability to read the scholarly literature that is available. In the world we live in, scholarly literature is dense and convoluted in style. In most graduate classes, instructors will expect you not only to read and understand this literature without help but also to lead discussions on that same material. Why should the entrance exam test your ability to comprehend a totally different kind of prose than you will encounter in graduate school?
I don’t think you saw this example of GRE ‘scholarly literature’ quoted in the article, because I can’t believe you’d defend a sentence like this one:
“The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire.”
Far from ‘scholarly writing’, this is the writing of a person who hasn’t attended a high school class on punctuation.
And for argument’s sake, let’s say convoluted and dense writing styles are ok. But as the author says, why can’t academic writing (including the GRE passages) make use of wordprocessing features like bold, italics, underline, bullet points, and so on? These things make life easier for the reader and are widely used now because of computers, which were not widely available in earlier times. What about headlines, which all ‘scholarly literature’ articles have?
Also you mention that “In the world we live in, scholarly literature is dense and convoluted in style”. But this doesn’t mean the world cannot and should not change. Just because earlier generations wrote densely, this doesn’t mean we should continue doing the same. In the olden days, language such as thine, thee and so on were used. We don’t use language like that anymore. Times change; language cannot remain a prisoner of the past, or a prisoner of lazy and arrogant ‘scholars’ who can’t be bothered to make their writing accessible.
- Zouzax, Spriteling, chaussettes and 3 others
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Don't try to do too many things at the same time, it will confuse you and the evaluator as well. Keep it simple, that's the philosophy, that way clarity will be maintained.
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this is really interesting. When I took the SATs in high school, my verbal and quantitive scores were only ten points apart. Ive always considered my math and reading skills to be on par with each other. So I was really surprised when my GRE scores came in and my verbal score was 120 points below my math score. During the test, I had a really hard time reading the passages and answering all the questions in the allotted time -- that was definitely the part that slowed me down. This article explains things really well.
Something similar happened with me, and I wondered why. It's not like my reading skills dropped suddenly. If anything, I had begun reading more widely than when I was in high school.. One thing I find really bizarre is that all the test-preparation advice says you should read newspapers, magazines and so on. And the irony is that, as the article shows so clearly, the reading comprehension passages are not written in the reader-friendly manner of newspapers, magazines etc. All this advice is useless, it's probably worse than useless because you get used to reading reader-friendly language, rather than the boring and convoluted text of the test passages.
This article is game-changing. Wonder what will happen if someone from ETS reads it, have half a mind to forward it to them.
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Very provocative and thoughtful article that says the reading comprehension test is flawed, leading to poor scores. The article is a bit long but definitely worth reading thru.
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Very, very interesting! Thanks.
Also read that rather than saying something like, "he was scared", we should describe fear, eg "His heart began beating rapidly and his hair tingled" or suchlike.
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Age would definitely not be an issue, but the low verbal is definitely a problem. I would retake, to maximize chances.
Fundamental flaw in GRE reading comprehension test
in GRE/GMAT/etc
Posted
Even if the author is wrong in how he's re-worked the sentence, he's broken it down into shorter chunks, something you've agreed with. I'm sure you would do a better job of reworking the sentence and writing it more clearly. If the GRE passages are written more clearly, they'll be easier to comprehend, which in turn means that the test-takers' scores currently cannot entirely be a reflection of ONLY their reading comprehension ability. Comprehension naturally depends on how clear the writing is too.