When I was little, my mom used to tell me how smart I was. She said that if I worked hard enough, I could be anything I wanted to be—I used to be naïve enough believe her. I thought I was going to gallop through college on a white steed until graduation, upon which I’d brandish my Bachelor’s degree at the castle walls of some esteemed grad school. I was callow and careless until I realized about midway through my junior year that there was a serious obstacle between this knight and his future castle…and its weapon is multiple choice.

If you’re like me, when you walk by people thigh deep in note cards and one of those giant MCAT prep books, you thank God that you majored in something else. You don’t have to take the MCATs, the LSATs, the DATs, or any of those daunting, specified entry exams in acronym form. Baby, take a bow.

But before you start sleeping in on Saturday mornings there’s something I think you should know. If you plan on leaving Buffalo for graduate school (most careers these days prefer that you do), you’ll have another exam to worry about. And this entry exam is not like its cousins, you know, the relevant ones.

The MCAT, LSAT and other standardized tests challenge the ability and knowledge that you’ve gained from your four years of undergraduate study. Quite relevant, indeed. While the only purpose, it seems, of the Education Testing Service’s (ETS) Graduate Record Exam test is to prove to the majority of pending college graduates that after three and a half years of advanced education we don’t know shit.

The GRE’s relevancy to life is irrelevant. And while you may not be familiar with the name, I assure you, you’re familiar with the format. It seems very much like the SAT in nature; there’s a verbal skills portion worth 800 points, a quantitative (or math) portion worth the same, and an essay section that is supposed to test your analytical writing skills, graded on a scale of zero to six.

The GRE is usually taken on a computer in a testing room. First, you first follow a set of unavoidable prompts on the basics of computer use. “This is how to click the mouse; now you try. This is how to scroll the mouse; now you try.” And while it very much looks like the SAT, looks can be tragically deceiving; for when you sit down in front of that computer, all your worst fears are actualized. The first section is an issue essay that takes an introspective 45 minutes, and a half-hour argument essay follows immediately after.

Following, an hour-and-fifteen-minute writing session, comes a verbal section that could chase you into the deepest, darkest corners of your Webster’s Dictionary—places you never thought you’d go, and doing things you never thought you’d do. Words like “vituperate,” ”jejune,” or “pulchritude,” are all synonymous with more common words; yet try to find any of them in a book or anything you’ve ever read. Really, try it. These kinds of words are just about as useful to everyday life as your appendix. If you ever hear anybody use a word like “lachrymose” or “obstreperous,” please, punch them in the gut. They’re probably studying for their GREs, and trying to show off their…um…“esoteric” and ”pedantic” knowledge.

Because a large portion of GRE vocabulary is obscure, success on the verbal section is submission to a false reality. The section consists of analogies, antonyms, sentence completions, and reading comprehension. Much of the material is so bizarre and alien that a test taker’s success is based more on their ability to identify and eliminate wrong answers, than their actual knowledge of the right answers. Here’s example of an analogy question from a review book:

OBLOQUY : ABUSIVE ::

a. panegyric : laudatory

b. slander : inflammatory

c. diatribe : accusatory

d. calumny : criminal

e. travesty : contemptuous

If you can solve this one without a dictionary—congratulations…you win? But chances are, you don’t know the meanings of half those words. Maybe you know if they’re positive or negative, or you can use them in a sentence, but can’t define them. Even if you get the question right (which, by the way, the answer is A), you don’t know any more about the words than you did before. Are you starting to catch my drift? Even if you do well on the exam, you’re not really proving your actual knowledge of the English language; you just know how to effectively eliminate and deduce the answers.

And my point about the GRE purpose resurfaces: the GRE isn’t there to show you how much you know, it’s there to show you in fact how little you know. I look at a question like the one above, and, like I was taught by my Princeton Review study materials, I try to make a sentence: “OBLOQUY is to ABUSIVE, as, PANEGYRIC is to LAUDATORY?” Sure. Whatever you say. But in actuality, I can only define one of these words, I can use one in a sentence, and the others are completely unknown to me…and I’m a freaking English major. So what do you do when you just don’t know enough of the words? Close your eyes and wait for Obi Wan Kenobi to guide you? Don’t waste your time. Fuck it, next question.

There is also, as I mentioned before, a quantitative section, which features some of the easiest math problems in some of the most misleading formats imaginable. The math is supposed to be simple—algebra, trigonometry, probability—everything you covered in high school. Generally, it’s not as difficult as the verbal, and students on average score over a hundred points higher on the math than the verbal (hint: note there are only four answer choices for math questions, and five choices for all verbal questions).

I apologize if this rant is your introduction to the wonderful world of Graduate Record Examination. It must sound pretty scary, and that’s because it is. It will completely ruin your life for about two weeks. But the least I can do now is to impart a small collection of important advice. Pay attention; this could save you time, money (for taking the GREs costs a whopping $140), and perhaps the last shred of dignity you can amass while you glaze through a GRE study book unaware of anything they’re talking about. Start studying now. I don’t care how you do it: read challenging books on your own time to learn some big words. Ask your 16-year-old sister to teach you the difference between a permutation and a combination. If you’re anything like me and haven’t taken math in three years, she probably knows more about it than you do.