You Know What Really Grinds My Gears? Blue Chip Standardized Testing; Me and the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions version of the GRE
It only makes sense that with standardized tests and their measures to stave off cheating there will be a large pool of possible questions picked for each individual exam. Unfortunately, those questions have a sliding scale of difficulty (or in the VERBAL section of the GRE, as was my case, obscurity) and sometimes a whole handful of “toughies” winds up in the same test. Luck of the draw.
Luckily for us test takers, the good people at ETS are keeping an eye on tests. I didn’t know that. I thought, after receiving some paltry verbal scores that either a) my multivitamin was switched out with stupid pills by an evil mastermind tabby cat, b) my over-extensive sense of ‘at least I’m not an idiot’ had long been deceiving me, or c) I got a BS test. It sucked, but I calmed myself thinking that most writing MFA programs don’t care about the tests, and that they’re merely a requirement of the graduate school. But, at the same time Iowa mentions on their website that GRE scores figure into teaching assistantship positions. And Johns Hopkins really cares about them. Not that JHU was high on my list (for most likely flawed stereotypes about the program gained from trolling blogs and message boards), but I looked at it after the test and allowed a glimmer of excitement (Dave-frickin-Smith!)but then had to extinguish it immediately.
But thank you ETS, once again, for screening the questions, even if it’s just after the fact, because I just got a letter offering a retest of the verbal section. The official explanation in the letter was
in a very small number of cases, the computer algorithm may not have selected an optimal distribution of test questions that would have allowed the test taker to fully demonstrate his or her true ability level.
I don’t care how it’s phrased, essentially it says “Hey, we know we kinda said you were retarded, but we might’ve been wrong.” And that’s fine with me. The fact that I didn’t slip through the cracks of “screwed by standardized testing” ungrinds my gears for the ETS. Word. And we’re back full circle.
January 1st, 2009 at 10:18 am
I’m glad they’re working to remedy the error, but it’s still bad for you (deadlines) unless they overnight your results to schools. I thought the test was flawed, too. Not because my Verbal score was too low, but because my Quant score was, I thought, way too high. I started to run out of time and ended up guessing on 50% of the questions.
You should demand monetary retribution for psychological damage.
Or just thank them and ask them nicely to express mail your new results with a note of explanation that your previous score was their bad.