GRE: worse than GBH?

An unmissable feature of the reading rooms at Beida are the Towers of Babels, or – for the non-engineering students – the more precarious Leaning Towers of Pisa, constructed of GRE books. That’s Graduate Record Examinations for those of you who are not Chinese, applying for an American university, and as a consequence in the library hoping your neighbour is an architecture major.

It’s a comprehensive test of language (vocabulary and analytical writing) and maths skills which can be decisive in your application. Leonidas is preparing for it now: he tells me he will be tested on a selection from 15,000 English words in the vocabulary section. And we’re not talking about words like ‘eat’ and ‘bright’ here. We’re talking ‘masticate’ and ‘incandescent’. Remember, this isn’t a test for Chinese students: it’s a test designed for Americans taken by Chinese students.

So today, like every day for the past few months and every day for the next few, Leonidas will revise a page of words in his preparation book. I once did this with Mary over a coffee last year, the two of us coming up with mental pictures and funny stories to remember difficult words by (at least one in every five I wasn’t familiar with). But the whole thing – however you go at it – is a long slog, by the end of which Mary in her own words “didn’t feel like learning anything”. Unfortunately it was all a little too much for her: her score was low, “not high enough to get into a good program, especially my writing”.

I thought I’d include this vignette of GRE hell as another illustration of the absurd pressures Chinese students put themselves under, and the walls they’re up against – on the other side of which, a lot of the time, is the dream of studying in America or the West, where we lament the laziness of our own students.