One week from today, I will tackle that leviathan of standardized, computer-adaptive, I-am-completely-unprepared-for-this-and-I-haven’t-done-long-division-by-hand-since-middle-school tests, the GRE.  Thanks to my extreme procrastinatory superpowers, I have held off on doing any significant preparation for the test until two weeks before the fact.  Is this a surprising turn of events?  In an obscure word that lends itself to esoteric analogies, no.

When applying for graduate school in Economics, one’s math score is far and away more important than one’s verbal or writing scores.  Accordingly, my early concerns and efforts focused primarily on remembering the quadratic formula and other such mathematical novelties.  Yet in spite of the (actually true) fact that I had to practice basic long division because I hadn’t tried it in over a decade, I’m starting to feel like I have a pretty solid handle on the quantitative portion of the GRE.  That means that it’s time to start working through those vocab lists.

The problem with most GRE vocab lists is that they are either incredibly massive and include words that any self-respecting person should remember (one website devoted specifically to GRE vocab actually gave me the word “screw” as a flashcard), or they are far too limited to cover the zillions of words that I last used in an essay on The Catcher in the Rye and have since pushed to the same dark recesses of my brain as my once-impressive knowledge of Step By Step episodes.

The obvious answer to studying vocab for a computer-adaptive standardized test… is a computer-adaptive vocab list.  That’s where FreeRice comes in.  No doubt some of you have engaged in this slightly-more-than-mindless pursuit while slacking off at the office.  In stark contrast, I hope to use its silly games for good.  While I’m still doing practice questions and looking up words left and right, I’ve yet to find a better practice method.  Hopefully, within a week, I can shake some of the rust off of my rather, um, pendulous definition of pendulous.  Oh, yeah, and I guess if some folks get some rice out of the deal that’s pretty good too.

Now, once I’ve used the website to become a poor graduate student, how do I go about getting some of that free rice?

Posted on July 25th, 2008 by Lee
Tagged: College, Procrastination