The GRE Makes Me VERY Angry.

For those of you that don't know, the GRE is the "Graduate Record Exam". If you have never heard of it, you are one of the fortunate people who don't have to face the ridiculousness that is this test. Anyone who wants to go to grad school has to take this test. Just like the LSAT for law school or the GMAT for business school. These tests are all based upon fictional skills that somehow qualify you to pay A TON of money to get yet another piece of paper. Don't get me started. I have always complained of the irrelevance of all of these things, but like a good circus monkey, I jump through the hoop.
Having decided to jump through the hoop with as much grace (and success) as possible, I signed up for a study course (which is also ridiculously expensive, but if you are jumping through a flaming hoop anyway, why not guarantee that you're not going to light your ass on fire, right?). Last week I was sitting in this class which is two and a half hours on one of my only days off, and I was pissed. They make you learn this crap that you feel like you should already know, and then you feel stupid because you can't figure it out, and the kicker is that you are well aware of the fact that this stuff should be really easy, because it's simple. You don't even need a calculator. Yet, we're all just too STUPID to be able to figure out if the quantity of A or B is bigger. I have been in school for 16 years, and yep, I'm a dumbass. Hurray.

So anyway, the stuff on this test is so irrelevant that I am 100% certain that I will NEVER come across it again for as long as I live-- even if medical advances extend my lifetime by 500 YEARS I will never need to know what the antonym of ameliorate is--- which by the way, I don't. On the back of the word card it says, "similar meanings" for instance, "better" or "improve". Now those are words I've used. Why aren't those f-ing words on the test? how in the hell do you even say ameliorate and not sound like you are speaking a language you only hear on STAR TREK?

So as I was sitting in this class feeling angry and stupid, it came to me. They make you take this test TO BREAK YOU. They figure if you can make it through the sheer agony that is studying for this test, that you have what it takes to go through 2-4 years of grad school. I get it. Now, if it is really that, I say that they have the exam on more whimsical topics- like Smurf Geneology and Pig Latin fluency. Lets call it like it is.

Even now, I have just spent 45 minutes doing homework for this course, taking careful time to work out the math problems, and frankly, feeling like I am finally getting this thing down. Submit the practice test....And I got a 47% people! It even had the nerve to give me statistics on questions that I had chosen the right answer and then switched it back to the wrong answer. I'm ready to throw my GRE study book into a vat of hot oil. I want to fry it, cover it in some hot sauce and EAT IT because it would do me more good to injest it than to read it.

The GRE makes me VERY angry.