GRE Disappointment

The New York Times reported last week that the new and improved GRE that was supposed to start this fall has been scrapped by ETS because it is “longer, more expensive, and more difficult to administer” than the current test. It sounds like they ran into big problems with ensuring access for test takers outside the US (who constitute 20% of GRE takers, a figure which surprised me) using an Internet-based system. The current GRE is available on a more or less constant basis, with administration by computer or by paper depending on the location, while the new test was going to be available on only 35 testing days. (They wanted to limit the days the test is available because of a scandal involving students in some Asian countries memorizing specific questions from the test they took and sharing them with others. By having a small number of test days, ETS could administer a completely different set of test questions each time and thus stymie cheaters.) Apparently ETS has delayed the deployment of the revised test twice before finally dropping it for good this time.

This is a bummer for me. I was really looking forward to the new test, with the increased emphasis on contextual language use, statistical reasoning, and critical thinking. Now I’m facing spending precious time looking at vocabulary lists to prepare for analogy questions like: "Apotheosis is to raven as ______ is to writing desk. (a) chicanery (b) encomium (c) iconoclast (d) panegyric."

And I suppose that the hated adaptive model that forces you to work each problem without skipping and does not guarantee you even the opportunity to see the harder problems on the test if you happen to be a slow starter and miss the first couple of questions is sticking around too. Grrr. Perhaps they will at some point be able to incorporate many of these content changes even having abandoned the plans to offer the test using the limited-day Internet-administration method.

I enjoyed this quote from a director at the Kaplan test prep company:

“We do think the new test would have been more challenging,” Ms. Kaplan said, adding that she welcomed the announcement. “It’s a positive thing that E.T.S. realized that the change would do more harm than good,” she said.

This is true if you assume that the sentence ends with “for my company, which completely relies on the ability of memorization and similar teaching-to-the-test techniques to increase test-takers’ scores. We’ve been freaking out for years now at the prospect of having to instruct people in how to think logically, understand and critique ideas, or do any kind of story-problem-based mathematical reasoning, and were depressed to consider that all our current books and software were about to become obsolete. I’m thrilled that logistical difficulties have thwarted the attempt to make a test with higher validity but that would ultimately have been a pain in the ass for me personally and a revenue blow to my organization in general.”

OK, I guess it might also be better for students from outside the US who may not have been able to secure the opportunity to be tested under the new system. (Like I needed the competition, right? At least my field of interest is only moderately quantitative.)

I can’t help but think how bitter the ETS psychometricians who have been working on this project for four years must be to see this thing die because the People’s Republic of Random Country doesn’t have a sufficiently developed infrastructure to support the testing system. Maybe Ms. Kaplan will send the project team a case of hard liquor and a “Sucks to be you!” sympathy card paid for out of the proceeds of the 100,000 extra test prep books on the old style GRE they will sell this year.

Appointed Rounds

Saturday night, it was 35 degrees and lightly sleeting when Robert and I were walking back to the car across the grocery store parking lot, and since I was not wearing a coat (because I had thought it would be too hot inside the store, not thinking about this nifty feature of coats: that they can be taken off indoors), I was feeling kind of sorry for myself. But then Robert pointed out the young guy wearing a lightweight rain jacket with a hood and a pair of knee-length shorts (?!) hunched stiffly over the long line of grocery carts he was pushing toward the building. Suddenly my situation seemed a lot better because (1) I only had to walk that distance in the cold and wet once rather than many dozen times, and (2) though I was wearing a light leather jacket instead of the wonderful water-resistant coat I had purchased last December, I at least had my freaking legs covered.

The store was pretty much a madhouse on Saturday night anyway and the lines were long in a way I’m not used to seeing outside my old (and now closed) Albertson’s. The family two carts ahead of us were obviously making use of additional dimensions of space-time to hold items they were purchasing because it was inconceivable that so many things could fit in the cart they had. (Forget clowns in a Volkswagen as the standard of the tight squeeze. I cannot fathom where the huge bag of potatoes came from.) In retrospect, it is obvious that the night before a holiday that features both big feasts and toys and candy for children will be a busy time at the grocery store, but I managed to be surprised by it.

I was also rather taken aback by the number of parents buying Easter basket items (or entire pre-packaged Easter baskets, which always seem lame to me) with their children present. These kids were young enough to still believe in the Easter Bunny, but old enough that they will easily recognize the 2 foot chocolate rabbit purchased Saturday night in Sunday morning’s basket. Has there been some mass movement toward telling children that the Easter Bunny has taken to outsourcing or are parents just so overwhelmed that they can’t manage the fairly simple-seeming task of buying this stuff on the sly? Of course, I am looking at the sample of people who are purchasing on the night before Easter, who may be a more desperate or less with-it group than parents as a whole. So perhaps I should not fear that America’s children overall are being robbed of an Easter experience in which a lagomorph plays the role of non-judgmental hero bringing chocolate-y goodness to all and sundry.

My own Easter morning conformed to a cargo cult model in which I put out my purple bunny-head basket and several minutes later, it contained a DVD of the Disney Alice in Wonderland movie (released with an extra disk of bonus materials), two Reese’s peanut butter cups, and the ugliest rabbit figurine made out of rocks ever known to man. Its big gold tooth is particularly pimpin’ and repellant. It would give a child nightmares. In the horror movie version of my life, it contains an evil spirit that will take over Leo’s body to plot the destruction of the world before realizing that Leo can’t even get over the baby gate blocking him from the rest of the apartment, thus severely limiting the scope of said destruction in a serious way. After finding that little totem, I was too afraid to test the magic basket thing again.

The Insidiousness of Things

You may have heard about the series of economics experiments demonstrating the existence of an "endowment effect" - people value something more highly if they own it than if they do not. These experiments have taken different forms, but perhaps the most famous one found that people who have been given a school mug (easily available at the college bookstore) required a higher trading price on the mug than those who are given the opportunity to buy one.

I am not interested right now in debating the merits of these various experiments, under what conditions this divergence between willingness to pay and willingness to accept appears to be greatest or mostly goes away, how this relates to the status quo bias and risk aversion, and why White Elephant exchanges at office Christmas parties are often so boring because people usually just keep whatever trinket they drew totally at random and all that (though those are fascinating questions well worth discussing), but I want to use this as an example: give a kid a crappy university mug and after owning it for just a few moments, they already start to see it as much more valuable than they did a minute before, when it was just a mug sitting on a shelf and not their very own mug. That's how quickly our possessions can start screwing with our minds. If people can be this way about a stupid trifle that they were just now given, imagine how we must be with things that we have purchased because we really wanted them at some time in our lives and that we enjoyed for many years and that we have become ridiculously emotionally invested in. It's frightening.

So I want to remind us all: constant vigilance! Don't let your possessions own you. There's no need to give them so much power. Take a risk - throw it away and have faith that your life will not be harmed by the fact that you no longer have the Strawberry Shortcake shaped eraser that your best friend in 3rd grade (whose name, let's face it, you can hardly even remember without thinking way too hard) gave you or your 4th favorite hammer or a book you read once and didn’t like all that much anyway or a pair of pants you haven’t fit for 15 years or a lifetime supply of scratch paper.

I have long loved this poem by M. S. Merwin. They speak so sweetly, but don't listen to their lies!

Things

Possessor
At the approach of winter we are there.
Better than friends, in your sorrows we take no pleasure,
We have none of our own and no memory but yours.
We are the anchor of your future.
Patient as a border of beggars, each hand holding out its whole treasure,

We will be all the points on your compass.
We will give you interest on yourself as you deposit yourself with us.
Be a gentleman: you acquired us when you needed us,
We do what we can to please, we have some beauty, we are helpless,
Depend on us.

42 Winks

Today at work, we had a little party with fruit (I very generously opened up the recalcitrant container of pineapple chunks before realizing I was thereby contaminating my hands), veggie tray, cheese and cracker tray (Ritz crackers are like the best trashy cracker ever), juice, Perrier, and a margarita machine (oh wait, scratch the margarita machine) to celebrate our admin's birthday this weekend. When someone asked her if she was going to do anything special to celebrate, she wasn't sure, so there were many suggestions about where she might go for a meal, etc. Then one person related how her sister, who already has four horses, three dogs, two cats, two children, one husband, and a job as an attorney is going to Canada to get yet another dog because it is from the same lineage as a dog with whom she had had a particularly special relationship that the sister valued and talked about in a pretty freakish way to be honest, which brought up the whole issue of how she can possibly juggle all those responsibilities, especially caring for four horses through Vermont winters (and what the hell good her therapist is doing if she continues to feel this compulsion to have additional pets), and people discussed what kinds of things they do that keep them feeling crazy busy. So I said, "Well by comparison to you guys, one of my hobbies is sleeping." Our admin (who has two teenage daughters who are on a lot of sports teams and who is in college part-time in addition to working full-time with us) said with an incredible tone of longing, "Oh my god. Sleep. I want to sleep on my birthday."

With tomorrow being Good Friday, and both my and Robert's directors deciding to give employees the day off even though it's not an official state holiday, we had discussed going birding in the morning and seeing what migrants are out there. But since it's now after midnight, I am thinking I will choose instead to start the day with no alarm clock and, if I'm lucky, a solid 8+ hours of sleep behind me. And really, there is no more appropriate time of year to sleep like the dead than this weekend.

Not Happy

I am so irritated by this math class right now I could scream. It's fine that he wants us to find the limits of the functions using the 6 properties of limits or he will return our homework and make us redo it. However:

(1) The specific proof that he tells us we should follow in answering the questions does not actually exist in the study guide as he claims.

(2) The proof that is included in the study guide uses a step which says

lim as x -> infinity of (1/x) / (1/x) = (1/2) / (1/2) = 1.

I have wasted the last 1.5 hours or more trying to understand what his expectations are for these proofs, trying desperately to make sense of this 1/2 business, and then writing an email laying out my questions. And since he has two days to respond to my email, yet more time will be wasted before I can make any forward progress.

I gave him a pass on a previous boneheaded error, where he gave the answer to his own problem as being -5/3 when it should have been -3/5 (or vice versa) but I am not feeling charitable in the slightest about this limit crap.

I realize that perhaps my instructor did not write this study guide but (1) his name is on it, and (2) he was responsible for ensuring that the information in it was accurate.

Am I the very first person to take this class via the UT extension service using this study guide? Am I truly a guinea pig as they figure out all their mistakes? If so, I even more thoroughly resent that I am paying hundreds of dollars for this class. They should be paying me to point out their myriad flaws. And these errors are big-time eroding their credibility. I am quite eager to see what the response is going to be and to what degree my instructor will respond in a way that recoups any of that credibility.

Perhaps I am going to find myself thinking back fondly on the Rice days when my math professors were arrogant jerks but could be trusted to actually, you know, do third week of first semester level calculus without errors.

11.1%

I have now completed 11.1% (2/18) of the assignments for my math class to be sent in the mail tomorrow. Preparing an assignment to be graded is a minor hassle: I have to photocopy the pages, fill out a cover sheet (of which there is a different one for each assignment, complete with bar code), put everything in an envelope, and then mail to the extension service. (Or, rather, give to Robert to take to the post office in his building to be weighed, stamped, and mailed.) In two weeks, I'll find out how I did.

I have found myself already making up rhymes and poor puns based on my instructor's name; it's sort of strange that the only things I know about him are his name, his ostensible gender, and what bits I glean from his writing style in the study guide. I actually thought his function/missile metaphor was rather confusing in a way, but that may have been because I already knew the material he was covering so any analogy seemed more complicated than the concept itself. The real test (for him as an instructor) is when we get to Taylor series. I will make myself open to enlightenment and see how well this distance learning via standardized written materials really works.

OK, I just googled him and came across this comment from one of his students on a teacher review: "He's ok looking, but not hot." Bummer for him, since I understand that physical attractiveness is the best predictor of college student ratings of their professors.

Pasta Primavera Chicken Salad Recipe

This is a nice, light cold main dish salad that is perfect for this time of year. The recipe calls for chicken, but you could substitute another protein if you like. Chickpeas or white beans might be especially good, or faux chicken strips. I tend to view the vegetable quantities as minimum suggestions and will use more if I have it. The base recipe is from Cooking Light.

1 c. carrot, julienne-sliced (3 oz) [I use the bagged matchstick cut carrots]
1 ½ c. broccoli flowerets (6 oz)
½ red bell pepper, cubed
½ green bell pepper, cubed
1 c. whole wheat rotini, cooked (3 oz)
1 c. white rotini, cooked (3 oz)
1 lb. chicken breast, cooked and cubed
½ onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 c. white vinegar [I always use apple cider vinegar]
1/3 c. rice vinegar
2 t. balsamic vinegar [I usually am generous with the balsamic]
2 t. sugar [or Splenda]
2 t. dried oregano, crushed
1 t. freshly ground black pepper
½ t. salt
1 T. olive oil

1. Cook carrot, peppers, and broccoli about 10 minutes in vegetable steamer until crisp-tender. Combine pasta, vegetable mixture, and cooked chicken in a bowl; set aside.
2. Coat a small saucepan with olive oil spray; place over medium heat until hot. Add onion and garlic; sauté until tender. Remove from heat; stir in vinegar and remaining ingredients. Pour over pasta mixture; toss well. Cover and chill.

Serves 4.

Each serving by my reckoning has 404 calories, 8.5 g fat, 5 g sugar, 43 g protein.