So, you’re foregoing the real world for graduate school. Congratulations! You have chosen to delay the inevitable by another two to three (or even six) years. I know, I know. Of course, your intended career path requires graduate school. How could I be so unaware?

I mean to say that I agree with you. The job market is sputtering right now, and it will most definitely recover back to its previous cruising altitude and speed once you have dropped $40 thousand or more on additional education. For you, I’m sure it’ll pick right up as you receive that second diploma. If you can sell yourself that fantasy, maybe you should think about retail – or politics, or advertising, or any of the booming industries that basically just lie to people.

Anyway, before you can actually enroll in the safe haven of a graduate school, you probably have to sign up for the GRE.

This exam and its alphabet-soup cohorts (the GMAT, MCAT, LSAT, etc.) are the Grendel’s mother of standardized testing. You should remember dispatching the ACT and SAT before college. Well, they were Grendel. That testing monster terrorized your mead hall of a high school and ate the dreams of your fellow sleeping students until you ripped a score off of the monster and hung it up in your house. It then could only return to its hellish dwellings and bleed out, much like this metaphor.

Four years later, Grendel’s mother – the literary version, not the Angelina Jolie remake – has risen to avenge its son. You must advance into the testing center lair of this beast on your assigned testing date, where you must follow its silly rules as you fight on its terms.

Beowulf could only kill Grendel’s mother with a sword forged for a giant, but for the GRE, you are stripped of your calculator, forced to battle unwieldy long division and square roots without a proper blade.

Not only that – the usual and expected battleground is displaced. Academic fights are waged on a computer screen with no room for error as combatants lose the power to revisit problems once completed.

The GRE is divided into three laughably incomprehensive sections that include writing, verbal and math. Rest assured, your graduate school will not be able to ascertain all it needs to know about you from these scores, so remember to qualify them in your personal statements.

Writing (given a score out of six): The GRE begins with two unique essays. The issue essay requires you to argue one side of a given issue, and the argument essay requires you to critique a given argument. This portion of the test readily transfers into a real-life skill, one that mirrors the valuable experience of writing a letter to the editor to The Crimson White. I urge you to practice.

Verbal (given a score out of 800): Welcome back to middle school vocabulary tests. The familiar returning guests are antonyms, similes and fill-in-the-blank questions, in addition to a few reading comprehension questions. I do not mean to recoil with recalcitrant indignation, but to base roughly one-third of a test on an erudite affinity with definitions is disconcerting. Not to mention, these words are given without context in a sentence. That’s like a math problem asking for the value of a variable without providing an algebraic expression.

Math (given a score out of 800): Have I mentioned you can’t use a calculator? The GRE assures that its problems will not require test takers to perform advanced calculations. But I assure you that is flawed reasoning. Forcing test-takers to squander precious time with long division fails to test the supposed important principles of math. The GRE also has an inferiority complex and openly admits to employing trick questions. If I wanted trick questions, I would have taken the X Games exam.

I’m taking the GRE today askance. With help from the Princeton Review, I hope to return home, like Beowulf, after landing a successful coup de grâce on my scholastic foe. Successful or not, I will still have to face that fearsome job market someday – or I could apply to Teach for America.