I Feel The Earth Move Under My Feet
Many a true word is said in jest.—I don’t know, but I heard it from my mother.
I moved to Los Angeles, to a little bungalow in Laurel Canyon, the day before the Northridge earthquake. Timing is everything, just like on the GRE. I woke up around 3 in the morning. Because the bungalow was jumping up and down. As a stupid easterner, I thought, Oh, it’s an earthquake. They have them here. I didn’t know it was The Medium One. (It was amazing to see the damage—piles of rubble on Ventura Boulevard and in Hollywood, and the I-10 ramp to the 405 fell down.) As long as I was awake, I decided to go to the bathroom. The first big aftershock threw me into the door frame. It’s unsettling not to have a firm foundation under your feet. You feel out of control and at the mercy of forces larger than you.
And that’s the way students feel about the GRE. And for the same reason, metaphorically speaking. In every GRE class I’ve taught, most of the students were bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by the shakiness of their foundation knowledge. The ground was not firm beneath their feet. It paralyzed them. They understood the concepts of the problems and the relevant strategies to employ, but could not then solve the problems in a timely manner, if at all. Especially on the quant side, the GRE tests a logic system—be precise, don’t assume, pick the choice that must follow. The arithmetic and algebra are the moral equivalent of reading English. You would like to be able to take those skills as much for granted as you do reading words. When I say 7 times 13, you say 91. Think of it as a rap. When you see .625, you say 5/8. Woot. All seriousness aside, people waste 30 seconds a question in the quant because they don’t know their times tables or squares or the fractional decimal percentage equivalencies. Or their algebra isn’t smooth and silky. Think about how much time that uses up during the section. How do you fix that? How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. That’s a New York joke—LA classes hate it. Having that mastery frees you to identify the type, the approach, and the traps—to do what has to be done to score well.
It truly pains me to see students who have the capacity to excel crippled because they lack that fluency and facility. And this is the tough love part of the evening. People have to not kid themselves about what they want the most. Youse guys can do it. You have to want it enough to do the work that you need to do. I had an acting coach who said, You can have anything you want if you’re willing to sacrifice everything for it. Hear the second part. When I was a young I considered going expat in Paris, even though I was decades too late, but, never mind. I didn’t go because I wasn’t willing to sacrifice things that I ultimately considered more important. It wasn’t a failure; it was a choice. It’s the same with y’all. If you don’t want to put in the time and effort that it would take you to score brilliantly, it’s not a failure—it’s a choice. Maybe even the right choice. Just don’t kid yourself. The older I get, the more respect I have for what is. If you want most to max out on this exam, do the amount of foundation work that you need. I have worked with folks who started from zero and went to the best programs in their fields. They worked real hard for as long as it took, and I admired their dedication. Do the work. You can. I am trying to be encouraging here, but I was raised by Germans, and it’s not part of the culture of my people.
Where did everybody go? What did I say? Just kidding. . .I hope. Some people feel that they don’t have time to do the foundation work and meet their deadlines. It’s a bad, even self-defeating, excuse. Of course I don’t know you—perhaps you have several husbands and many children to support. But deadlines are artificial. I don’t want to sound like your grandfather, but in twenty years you’ll barely remember when you started grad school. I know you don’t believe me, but I went through undergrad at a top school in three years. And now it means nothing to me. Just sayin’. Also, quite frankly, waiting a year usually improves your application because you garner not only higher GRE scores, but also more accomplishments. Or go to Paris and paint—you’ll always be glad that you did.
People generally associate foundation work with the math, but there also such work in the verbal. When I’m being mean to students, I say, You know what the secret to Sentence Completion and Sentence Equivalence is? It’s a lot harder if you don’t know what the words mean. Bring the same rigor to the verbal that you do to the math. Notice the parallel—-you know the strategy guide approach to sentence completions but vocabulary issues handicap you, just as you know the rate formula but cracks in your quant foundation hamstring you. Be willing to make vocab flash cards and use the words—at least in your inner monologues if you are too embarrassed to do so in Facebook posts. (But let me point out the upside, if your friends all think you’ve become a pompous twit, you will have more time to study. Just kidding. Sort of. After all, you can always make more friends, but there’s only one Maltese Falcon. It’s a movie joke, don’t mind me.)
Do you want to do more? It’s a choice. Read literature—many novels written before the second world war feature now obscure words that the GRE fancies.* I can hear you sputtering in outrage about this fact of life, but remember that what is thang I wrote about early. Try Somerset Maugham if you want to ease in. If you’re up for it, try DH Lawrence, Thomas Wolfe, or William Faulkner. Even Evelyn Waugh”whom you might find more amusing.
There is a reward. As I said, if your quant and vocabulary foundations are solid, then you are free to devote yourself to the approaches, form, and awareness delineated in the strategy guides. Then you can gain the mastery and control necessary to max out this exam—-but the mastery and control I speak of is akin to that displayed by Olympic gymnasts and concert pianists. When I was young and pretty, I went to a method acting school in Manhattan. These guys were hard core, as I’m trying to be here. A quote carved over the front door read, I wish the stage were as narrow as a tight rope, so incompetents would fear to trade on it. The GRE is a tight rope and requires the same commitment to form and precision. And the same rock solid foundation. So do that preparation and don’t kid yourself about it—as Jimi Hendrix used to say, Castles made of sand fall into the sea, eventually. Especially during earthquakes.
*I tried off and on to use some annoying GRE type words but fancies is a classic example. To fancy can mean to like. You see it a lot. . .in one hundred year old books.