Fickle tests, and courses

Not fickle courses, mind you. Just that the tests are fickle, and there will be something about courses in this post.

I may be influenced largely by the fact that I’m taking the GRE (or as Danny called it, the ToD) on Friday, but I’m even further convinced than before that standardized testing is a horribly ineffective way to measure aptitude. The GRE is worse than the SAT. The skills that I will need to exhibit in grad school - for example the ability to comprehend theoretical linguistics, conduct (and understand) experiments, and propose models to fit data - cannot be deduced from how well I can add or how many big words I can cram into my brain before the day after tomorrow (eek).

The worst part of the whole deal is that I could be working on my thesis which, when completed, will prove my ability to comprehend theoretical linguistics, conduct (and understand) experiments, and propose models to fi…

That, and I actually enjoy working on my thesis. Yes, the articles I’m reading are rather dense, and it is also true that I sometimes want to throw my notebook out the window (good thing it has a screen), but I can easily say that I enjoy thesis work 100 times more than studying vocabulary or finding the difference between the area of a circle and a square inscribed inside it with sides of length 4π

In other news, it looks like I may take every linguistics course offered next semester except for one. Huzzah. If I did that, I would be taking:

• Ling 110a (Phonology - I’ve already taken this course, but I want to audit it this semester because I liked it so much last time)
• Ling 140a (Discourse and Pragmatics - Assuming a theory of sentence-level linguistic competence, what phenomena are still to be accounted for in the explication of language knowledge? The class explores topics in language use in context, including anaphora, deixis, implicature, speech acts, information packaging, and pragmatics of dialogue.)
• Ling 190b (Readings in Formal Linguistics - basically a “best of” of articles in the sub-disciplines of Linguistics, as well as some basic squib-writing)
• Ling 197a (Language Acquisition - which, as you may or may not know, is the topic of the conference I’ll be attending next month)
• Ling 99d (Thesis)

I just love how they all start with “Ling” The only Ling course offered next semester I won’t be taking is Syntax, which I’ve already taken, and am basically re-teaching myself for my thesis anyway.

Wow, that was all very serious. There’s something fun behind this cut:
Pony!

Click the pic for an explanation of why I’m riding a pony in the parking lot behind my dorm…

One Response to “Fickle tests, and courses”

jojo Says:
October 12th, 2006 at 12:09 am

the uh, horsie wrangler appears to have her face buried in her…pony’s flank?! that is way sweet. you have the greatest friends, fo sure.

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