I have often wondered why programs insist in relying on the GRE as a measurement of a students potential for success and/or admittance to their program. First of all, the GRE is nothing but a randomized exam that tests so-called "skills" that few if any people ever use or have used in their professional and/or academic lives. The idea of using a standardized exam as a tool to deny potentially great students a quality graduate education has been something that has bothered me for a very long time. Too many departments place the bulk of their acceptance decisions on the GRE, despite their claims else wise.

Second, the thought that a single standardized test outweighs the achievements, personal and academic, of a student striving to achieve a great education is quite disheartening. Many students have fought very hard to reach the graduate level, coming from less-fortunate backgrounds, having published articles even books and book chapters, participated heavily their respective academic communities, etc., only to be denied acceptance from most, and more commonly all, graduate departments to which they had applied. Departments attempt to claim that they make decisions based on a number of factors, with the GRE being only one small factor, but the well-known secret is that departments use the GRE as a first-cut tool in order to trim applications, without ever having opened a students application to evaluate them on the merits of those “several factors.” It is truly unfortunate that many professors do not give each applicant a truly fair judgment based on ALL of the merits of their application.

I personally witnessed one professor, the graduate director no less, at a particular university, deny a student seeking admittance to their PhD program due solely on that students GRE score. Never mind that this particular applicant had a masters degree with a very high grade point average (top 2%), several publishing’s even one book and articles published as an undergraduate, multiple conference presentations and chairmanships, a distinguished military background, and many other highly impressive qualifications. The only catch was that this applicant did not score well on the GRE. When I, personally, inquired to the graduate director as to why this applicant was not given greater consideration he stated, “Why should I accept this student, with all his experience, but a low GRE over an undergraduate who scored high on the GRE and wrote an exceptional honors thesis?” I was dumbfounded as to how the graduate director, supposedly an enlightened academic could even see a comparison between the two applicants.

But what, really, are the problems with the GRE? Is it possible for an exam, that provides random questions designed to be as difficult as possible for the test taker, essentially pushing them towards failure? There exist a number of glaring problems that challenge the legitimacy of the GRE as well as the departments that rely to heavily on this defunct examination. I will highlight just two of the most egregious:

1.The GRE is socio-economically favorable to upper-class and upper middle-class students. Many poor and lower middle-class students are forced, by way of their socio-economic status, to attend public schools with sub-standard curriculum and rarely, if ever, are exposed to a more complex education than that of their wealthier counter parts who attend private or at least well-funded suburban public schools. When it comes to the GRE many applicants from poorer regions of the country do not have as well a vocabulary base or as high a math standard as the GRE throws at them. This is more so the case if these poorer students also attended less well funded undergraduate universities. The reality for lower income students that want an education is that they must attend colleges that they can afford and thus at the university level these students may also not gain the necessary tools to pass the GRE with a high enough score not to end up some professors trash bin. Departments that rely so heavily on the GRE invariably end up with wealthier students, some of whom do very poorly in their programs, whereas the poorer, rejected student might very well have been a start pupil.

2.The GRE is heavily language biased. Many students that come to U.S. universities from non-native English speaking countries are at a natural disadvantage in the GRE. This in no way means that these students do not have the requisite language skills needed to do well in the programs to which they apply, only that they are less likely to know the “most nearly opposite word to panegyric” let alone the actual definition of this word.

Let us, here, discuss the merits of continuing to use the GRE as a standard by which students are pitted against in their attempts to win admittance into American Universities. I pose this question: should the GRE remain as a standard by which a students potential for success is measured, given just the few issues I have listed above? And if the answer is yes, are we not admitting that the admittance system is based upon a form of discrimination in which many applicants cannot do anything about, similar to the color of their skin?