It’s the last semester of college. You have managed to conquer four years of all-nighters, 18-page papers and working yourself to death. But you’re an overachiever and applying to grad schools to continue your education, better your life and expand your horizons. So what do you get in return? Another test.

The Graduate Record Exam, or college senior cause of death, is just another way for the hierarchy of public institutions to refer to you as a number in their accounts receivable. Applying to college the first time was hard enough, but now, after you have proven you are worthy of a bachelor’s degree, it’s back to square one to prove your worth based on how you fill in a bubble.

According to fairtest.org, the GRE is incapable of predicting success, with the exam accounting for only 9 percent of the variation among grades of first-year graduate students.

Now, standardized testing is perfectly effective at measuring ability in some areas of study. However, there are plenty of disciplines where it is not. However not all areas of academia can be measured with a cookie-cutter test.

According to a 1997 study conducted at Yale University assessing the relationship between GRE scores and grade point average, the predictive power of the exam dropped to 1 percent when comprehensive measures of performance, such as faculty assessments, were used. Thus, one test cannot serve as an indicator of how successful a student will be in the classroom.

The GRE website states their test combined with undergraduate grade point average act as predictors of long-term success in graduate school. However, when analyzing the sample size, you will see that only students studying biology, chemistry, education, English, and psychology are used. Their report (Predicting Long-Term Success in Graduate School: A Collaborative Validity Study; Burton, Wang, 2005) also states these fields were chosen because of their high enrollment, and are intended to serve as a representative database. Hold the phone; you can study more than just the five disciplines they base their logic off of. You can’t base the success of every graduate student in America off of five different subjects.

And what about majors that aren’t even testable? If you’re getting a masters degree in creative writing, or French or theology, the bubble you fill in will not help determine whether or not you’re the next Earnest Hemingway. It simply will force you to waste your time preparing for the exam, while you could be focusing on what you’re writing now.

Now, sifting through applications is by no means a fun time, but considering the thousands of dollars about to be handed to whatever university has struck your fancy, why are graduate-school deadlines so early? Of course you have all the time in the world to submit excessively extensive applications with my useless GRE score during midterms. Who wouldn’t?

So what is the solution to this corrupt system? There isn’t one. Actually, there is, but it takes boatloads of money and requires university administrators to care about what kind of students they bring in rather than who they can squeeze the last penny out of. But the deadline is not the issue, rather it’s that when facing the life-accomplishment of graduation, being tested again is simply unfair.

Plenty of universities have adopted a truly holistic admissions process — several others claim to have done the same, but still put you through the hell of the GRE.

A number of schools in Illinois, including Northwestern, Columbia and DePaul, have done away with GRE scores as requirements for graduate applications. These schools only look at undergraduate grades, essays, recommendations and conduct personal interviews. Now wouldn’t that just be great: an educational institution that wants you for you rather than what you scored on a test. The problem is those schools tend to cost twice what a public university does and chances of an assistantship are slim to none. It’s a rock and a hard place, and unfair that a truly holistic approach to choosing graduate students is (for the majority of fields) only utilized by private institutions. Using the GRE to sort students is unfair, and ineffective when there are, although more time consuming, more adequate approaches available.

So to my fellow overachievers who want that extra piece of paper hanging in their office someday, here’s some light at the end of the tunnel. The GRE is not a process that follows you and determines what kind of a student you are. It’s simply an obstacle you must be prepared to get over. Know what the GRE will consist of, but don’t rack your brain attempting to study for things you already do or don’t know. The format of the GRE has not changed in nearly 20 years. The only updates are the content and adding computers. So think of the GRE as a game rather than a test. Because all standardized tests are just a game, and one pre-season game never determines who wins the national title.

“Taking the GRE is a game with its own rules, traps, and measures of success…how you do on the GRE is an indication of how well you play the game, but it is not an indication of how ‘intelligent’ you are, or what kind of student you will make.”

-Jacobson R.L., The Chronicle of Higher Education