GRE

When I started my Ph.D., I was presented with a moral dilemma, which I wrote about. I was supposed to take the GRE, the Graduate Record Examination, which is administered by the Educational Testing "Service" (the quotes are mine--I don't feel "served" by an entity that robs people of money, time, and emotional well-being in its role as gatekeeper--and not even a good gatekeeper, at that). This article is about what happened when I decided I wouldn't take the test even though it was a requirement for being accepted into the Ph.D. program. The title is kind of dumb...

How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the GRE

Juanita D. Price and Carolyn Cutler Osborne

This story is told in Carolyn's voice. Yet its existence was made possible by the ideas of Juanita Price; therefore, we are both authors of this story.

At the end of 1989, I began a three month process of leaving my old job, as director of a battered women's shelter, and returning to school. I decided to work on an interdisciplinary master's degree (I have a master's degree in Counseling Education) as a part of my goal of being a writer. I had received a graduate research position with Dr. Rob Tierney, a person who is well known for being a proponent of authentic assessment.

Over the course of my first couple of years working on this interdisciplinary degree, two things happened. First, the world of authentic assessment opened up to me. It began with Tierney, Carter, and Desai's book on portfolios, which was handed to me in second draft form. I was asked to edit it. As I worked closely with the three authors, getting them to clarify the ideas in the manuscript, I began to understand many of the problems of traditional forms of assessment but also the richness of portfolio assessment.

The second thing that happened was that my master's thesis, on which I had begun to work by that point, was starting to look suspiciously like a dissertation. Several people suggested that this would be a waste of my time to write a long master's thesis and then to write a dissertation on top of that. They said I should look into transferring my earned hours into the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program.

The transfer process involved getting myself accepted into the English Department Ph.D. program and after that, into the interdisciplinary program. That was fine with me; yet, there was a rub. The English Department required that I take the Graduate Record Exam as part of the admission process, an exam which I had not been required to take for either master's program I had been in.

The more I thought about it, the more I knew that I would not be able to make myself take that exam. It was not just the fact that those exams are tedious and boring, particularly when one understands how meaningless they are--I certainly did not want to spend a Saturday morning filling in little circles with a number two pencil.

During the years that I worked at two different battered women's shelters, I had run into people who were extremely smart and on top of that, wise, and whose intelligence and wisdom would never have been identified by the GRE. The most prominent example of this is my collaborator, Juanita Price, who has been my friend and mentor for twelve years now. Many, many times I have listened to Juanita's analyses in various contexts--from texts we both have read to situations we both have lived through--analyses which are thoughtful and sophisticated. Juanita's ideas have been a consistent intellectual delight to me because through them I have learned some new ways of looking at the world.

Yet, if you were to put her in front of the GRE, it would fail to reflect the richness of her thinking because it asks the wrong questions and it asks them in such an alienating fashion.

Because of the originality and the thoroughness of her thinking, Juanita Price is the quintessential intellectual. Yet her relationship with the university remains marginal in part because the university isn't interested in originality. This institution is set up for "success" as defined by the GRE, a "success" that is based on a superficial (memorized) mastery of a white canon rather than the ability to think critically or to create new paradigms in the understanding of human relationships. As a matter of fact, the university as an institution is fundamentally conservative, rejecting any kind of thinker whose thoughts might imply shifts in how we understand each other or how we create and run an institution of higher learning.[1]

Taking the GRE, then, was not an option for me. Yet, in part for the sake of our collaboration, I needed to be in a Ph.D. program. One of us needs the "union card" that the letters P, H, and D behind one's name impart, the position of authority recognized by members of the academic community, one arena in which Juanita and I have chosen to place our ideas.

As I thought about it more, I saw the problem of the GRE as an opportunity for making a statement and I saw that I was the ideal person to make that statement. By the time I was applying to the English department, I had had two academic publications and I had written several strong papers in the graduate level classes I was taking for the interdisciplinary masters program. The English department required a writing sample; I knew that I would be able to provide them with incontrovertable evidence of my abilities to write and to think. Furthermore, since I had been taking graduate level English classes and had done well in them, I would have strong letters of recommendation from English Department faculty. Evidence of my abilities to succeed in the program could be found, then, in narrative documents rather than a set of numbers from a problematic test.

I consulted with Rob, who was very supportive of my stance. He provided me with several references about the GRE, including David Owen's book None of the Above which is about the Scholastic Aptitude Test but which is also about the Educational Testing Service. If I was opposed to taking the GRE before reading that book, I was adamantly opposed afterwards. I went to the library and, using ERIC, I found some more references that were specifically about the racial biases of the GRE as well as the fact that it is not a particularly good predictor of academic success, especially for minority students.

I then wrote a letter (see Figure 1). While I was waiting for the response to this letter, I considered my options. I was not clear on what I was willing to sacrifice for this stance. Yet I also felt that if my request not to take the GRE was turned down, I did have the ultimate option of taking the test and deliberately failing it. Several students in a California school had adopted this strategy on an achievement test administered by their school ("Students Subvert Scores," quoted in Tierney, Carter, and Desai). This would not have been my preferred strategy because it was problematic--I would have had to pay money to ETS and sit in the chair for several hours, but having this possibility in my mind allowed me to be somewhat relaxed during the waiting process.

The English Department's reply more than gratified me. First of all, I was extremely grateful to the chair of the Graduate Studies Committee in that department, Dr. XX, for the process the chair used. She sent around my letter requesting exemption from the GRE and got a decision about that issue before she sent around my application (my writing samples and the letters of recommendation). Thus, the decision the committee made was based on the principles outlined in my letter rather than the feeling that in my individual case the GRE scores were not necessary. I was further gratified by the fact that my letter had engendered a discussion among that committee about the GRE as a requirement. I later found out that the department had decided to keep the GRE as a requirement but that future requests for exemptions from that requirement would likely be successful.

There are several conclusions that I can draw from this experience. One is that change involves taking personal risk. It is all well and good to make statements against racism; there comes a time when people have to put their money where their mouth is. At the time, it felt like a risk for me to write this letter. The success of this effort was sweet and worth a hundred times the risk.

Secondly, effective change happens from the bottom up. Certainly the Educational Testing Service is not going to make the GRE into an example of authentic assessment--even if it were possible to do so, that move would substantially reduce the money they make from this test. The administration is not going to change the structure of the university because they are not going to run the risk of reducing or ending (or even substantially changing) their own jobs--or who gets those jobs. Many professors will not change the university because they are too involved in trying to succeed in the tenure/full professor rat race. If they have succeeded in that race, they likely have bought into the system sufficiently that they will not offer any serious challenge to the current structure.

That leaves the students and the student-wannabes, the people whom the university is supposed to educate, to benefit. We need to discern where we can make interventions and we need to make those interventions. To allay some fears--those interventions do not need to be rude or mean. I wrote a polite and respectful letter that made clear my stance and the reasons for that stance. I wasn't even angry in my letter although I am angry about the racism that led to the need to write the letter. There are times in which we need to express anger, but there are also times in which our interventions can be friendly--and firm.

How we learned to stop worrying: the GRE is a point at which intervention can be made. There are numerous references to its problematic nature. In fact, where you find a reference in its support, you usually find an ETS author! These guys are desperate. Finding information, then, is very easy--any library with ERIC will have loads of high quality references you can use. My library research on this issue took about thirty minutes from the ERIC search to finding several usable articles.

At the university which I attended, the GRE is a departmental requirement. This means that the challenge to it is localized. That is, the people who make the decision about exemptions to the GRE at the university are within a department rather than in the university administration (in the Graduate School or above that). While this means that we need people in many different departments to make the challenge, it also means that requests for exemption are typically handled by the same people who will be making a decision on your application rather than by faceless administrative types who are in love with the rules they have created. If you are at another university, check who makes the decision and plan your strategies accordingly.

Finally, we need to communicate with each other. That is why we have written this article. Let's give courage to each other and keep the vision of the ideal university in our eyes so it can guide our actions.

References

Owen, David. 1985. None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Tierney, Rob; Mark Carter; and Laura Desai. 1991. Portfolios in the Reading-Writing Classroom. Norwood, Mass: Christopher-Gordon.

Figure One: Carolyn's Letter

3 November 1992

Dr. XX

Department of English

Dear Dr. XXXX:

I am writing to find out if the Graduate Studies Committee of the English Department would be willing to review my application for admission to the doctoral program without Graduate Record Examination scores.

The prospect of taking the GRE creates a moral dilemma for me. To begin with, I do not believe that any human being's intellectual capacities can be adequately represented by a numerical score or determined by a series of multiple-choice questions. Further, the GRE discriminates significantly against disadvantaged segments of the population.

There is abundant evidence that the GRE discriminates against minorities. An article by Whitworth and Barrientos ("Comparison of Hispanic and Anglo Graduate Record Examination Scores and Academic Performance" Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 1990, 8, 128-132) briefly reviews studies of the predictive value of the GRE, especially in relation to ethnic minorities. They state that for the general population "correlations between GRE scores and graduate grades were low and ranged from .15 to .31" (p. 128). Their study found that anglos score significantly higher on the GRE and that the GRE was a poor predictor of graduate grade point averages. Their study corroborates other studies which also find significant differences between the scores of anglos and the scores of minorities.

The Report of the National Commission on Testing and Public Policy, entitled From Gatekeeper to Gateway: Transforming Testing in America (Chestnut Hill, MA: National Commission on Testing and Public Policy, 1990) reviews several concerns about standardized testing, from the misleading nature of scores as performance indicators to cultural biases common to tests. Finally, David Owen's book, None of the Above: Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1985) explores the many problematic practices of the Educational Testing Service in its development, dissemination, and advocacy of the various standardized tests it produces.

It is completely abhorrent to me to be required to support an institution such as the GRE that has significant biases against groups of people who must struggle for education in this society. I do not wish to participate in the perpetuation of these biases through taking the exam; I do not wish to have any of my money supporting the GRE or the Educational Testing Service through having to pay for the exam.

I understand that the English Department needs to have evidence of my scholastic abilities. I am willing to provide an extensive writing sample and letters of recommendation from professors who know my intellectual capabilities. My record, which will be sent to you, has grade transcripts for both my undergraduate and graduate programs. Additionally, I am willing to answer any questions anyone has of me.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me. My work phone is xxxxxxx, my home phone is xxxxxxx, and my e-mail address is xxxxxxxx.

Sincerely yours,

Carolyn Cutler

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[1]Why am I succeeding in this institution when Juanita is not? As the white, middle class daughter of an academic, I know how to "pass" my classes and how to "pass" as a traditional academic. I may have surprised or offended some of my professors, but my work has been of high enough quality that no one has had the grounds to fail me. Further, as an interdisciplinary person, I have never allowed one department to have total authority over my learning or my work; thus, my work with Juanita, for example, has benefited from my learning at the university but has also always been "elsewhere" in the university, untouchable by those whom it threatens. I strongly believe in the ideal of the university--as an arena in which ideas can be examined in some kind of thoughtful fashion. I hope to be a part of the creation of a university in which Juanita would be welcomed and valued.