London, Paris, Fairbanks

Last Friday’s jaunt into town included a stop at the Fairbanks Barnes & Noble store for browsing and (mediocre) Starbucks coffee. This is a large store that, unlike the independent Gulliver’s Books, looms next to a Sportsman’s Warehouse in a strip mall at the edge of town. Next to it: Home Depot and Walmart. 

I’ve often been to Gulliver’s: the coffee’s not much better, unfortunately, but they have a lovely used book section, a selection of local interest books, and are able to give fairly competent advice. But this is a small place, and for all its faults, B&N has armchairs, reading locals, wifi and an artificial gas fireplace. Asking the information desk for help — no copy of Dan O’Neill’s Firecracker Boys — was not without pain, but I walked out with a stack of book-shaped and related objects, among which the latest McGraw-Hill GRE test prep workbook, for the standardized test that is required for enrolling in formal graduate study in the US and Canada.

The first thing I learnt is that this very month they’re changing the test format. Also, scores won’t be on the 400-to-800-in-increments-of-10 but on a new 130-to-170-in-increments-of-1 scale. Whatever. Tasks are mostly multiple choice, and some look like this:

Before I forget: whatever you do, don’t buy this book. It is riddled with errors badly enough for me to go on Amazon and write my first-ever book review, giving it two stars and employing the phrase “not entirely worthless”. Linguists should be warned that the “grammar” review section is on par with the bottom drawer of advice literature.  I remembered McGraw-Hill as a serious academic publisher, so this was a disappointment. 

This GRE business isn’t of any urgency for me. The idea of adding, belatedly, some of the academic qualifications that I didn’t get when in my 20s has come up lately. My new work situation at UAF would open opportunities, but we’re at the “potential” and “maybe” stage. Nonetheless, it is good to know what formal hurdles there would be, and this GRE test thing is one of them. 

It doesn’t look insurmountable. Being well-oiled in elementary and middle-school level math and figuring out how US kids are taught to write essays seem to be two of the keys. The latter should be a lot easier than wrapping my head around the French dissertation format: the memory still makes me shudder, but I find the variation of essay styles across cultural areas quite fascinating. (“Your essay should start out with a clear statement of your position on the issue. There should be no doubt in the reader’s mind about which side you are on from the beginning of your essay” says the book — definitely not how I learnt it in Germany, but sure, if you want me to…)

As for the language part, I hope the image above is representative of shoddy prep material rather than of the test. But what really struck me was the mediocre quality of the texts underlying the reading comprehension tasks — an area where I don’t expect the real test to be any better. 

Which brings me to standardized testing. It’s something that we Europeans tend to turn our nose up at, and I should say not entirely fairly: setting equitable criteria for evaluation of outcome in a heterogeneous education system is a hard nut to crack, and such tests do help tease out some students that would otherwise be given less opportunity than they should. 

But this result comes with a price to pay: a higher one in language/humanities subjects, which are harder to shoehorn into multiple-choice questions than math. Still, does it have to be that bad? Any widely used test will set the incentive to prepare for it (duh!), but to expose kids to endless stacks of insipid 200 word texts that point out two odd things about flamingoes or argue on the most superficial level against government-sponsored health care or are otherwise full of the most irrelevant crappy consumerist chit-chat can’t be good for their critical faculties. After only a few hours I yearned for something more gritty, like two pages from Gulliver’s Travels, or some poem or other, or simply — it doesn’t have to be HARD, just INTERESTING — an extract from The Phantom Tollbooth (a wonderful book I read while in the hospital).