Monday, December 29, 2008

It'sJust Like I Imagine Prison...Minus the Prison Sex


I am very familiar with standardized testing...I think I've taken nearly every possible test in my life minus the GRE's, which I took Saturday...well, sort of. But, GRE's aside for a minute, I want to talk about the testing facility.

I know they want to keep people honest, but really how much cheating can you do on these things...seriously?? I walk into the testing facility and handed over my ID and sign in. This I understand. But after that I have to go to another woman not three feet away who takes my picture (really? this is necessary?) and makes me not only sign a confidentiality statment but makes me write the statement out...IN CURSIVE no less. This is completely insane to me since anyone over the age of ten writes in a printing/cursive hybrid anyway. Then, I get escorted into another room (more like a hallway) that is no more than a foot away from the woman who just made me write a paragraph of useless information. This hallway is not just a room. I swear I had more security watching me than OJ. The back of the room is all glass and the paragraph lady has her desk on the other side of the glass. On the side of her desk is a TV with the picture cut into four with different angles of the hallway room. And then there was a microphone in there so every time someone coughed you could hear it via the microphone in the waiting room.

I ask you..is all that necessary? If I lie on my GRE's or cheat off of someone, won't I just fail out of school anyway? And what are you going to do with the picture of me? Will I show up on the internet somewhere on Jennifer Aniston's body (I give my full permission for this to happen by the way so if someone could make that happen it would be fabulous).

Oh...and after having everything short of a strip search, I don't even get to actually take all of the test...something about a "GRE Global Meltdown"....

***ahem ... Prison Riot?? ahem***

On the bright side, I came out with some pretty sweet new GRE tats....a bunch of vocab that I have no idea the definition of....

6 comments:

Ray said...

wow...that is intense!

The Dutchess of Kickball said...

That sounds really pretty freaking rudiculous!

jb said...

Yeah, having to show ID is a given, but the rest is just plain nuts.

JB

Anonymous said...

You have made me so happy that I don't have one of them in my near future.

Good luck on the rest!

Andy - Instafather said...

That is hardcore. Even more hardcore than your awesome blog post title

EP said...

That's pretty ridiculous! I cannot believe they have so many measures in place like that. I'm with you -- if you cheat on your GREs, won't you just fail out of school eventually if you can't cut it?