GRE Study Hell

GRE: From GRE Prep siteMany of you know that I’ve been studying for the GRE. The more I study the more ridiculous I think it is. The test is meant to measure my “verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking and analytical writing skills” per the GRE site.

I don’t want to bore you too much so I will keep this short. Here’s a fun list of words commonly tested on the GRE.

• Castigate – to punish or criticize harshly
• Irascible – easily made angry
• Propitiate – to conciliate; to appease
• Torpor - extreme mental and physical sluggishness

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used those words in conversation. I can’t tell you because I HAVEN’T! Until now.

On Monday I had a conversation with my mom about my toddler’s behavior. She believes I should castigate him when he is really just showing strong problem solving skills. If she and my dad are that irascible I would prefer they just stay away. I attempted to propitiate my mother and then ended the call as quickly as possible. After hanging up I experienced torpor from the battle.

Ok, whatever, onto the math.

There’s much more useful stuff to study in the math section, oh, I’m sorry, the Quantitative section.

I can’t believe I didn’t already know how to find the sum of consecutive numbers but I didn’t. I could have used that information hundreds of times over the years, if I had been taking the GRE test hundreds of times over the years.

For the curious: So, you want to know the sum of the numbers 8 through 66? Freak! Anyway, first you find the average of the set of numbers by adding 8 and 66 then dividing by 2 to get 74. Next you need to know the number of terms in the set. To get this you subtract 8 from 66 and add 1 giving you 59. Finally, multiply the average by the number of terms to give you the sum of the numbers = 4366. Woo hoo.

FormulaThen there are all the geometry formulas that I could give a frick less about and are going to benefit me not one iota as a marriage and family therapist.

Without the benefit of further tutorials let me just list a few of the topics I need to study.

• How to solve a permutation problem
• How to solve a multiple-event probability problem
• How to find a new average when a number is added or deleted
• How to deal with standard deviation

I’m sure that’s quite enough. I’m also more than willing to acknowledge that there are readers who know what all that means and are thinking I’m a bigger idiot than ever. What can I say; I’m not an erudite (learned, scholarly, bookish).

Cheers!