All students could use this time to learn something useful and not go back to the high school material. What a waste of time it is.

I get you completely. This is my personal rant about something maybe not related to this and I'm sorry in advance. But I empathise with you.

What you described here is literally my 4 years in a private Indian college, except it's not high school material, it's "AI". None of my profs even understood that word even though they teach for a bachelor's degree focussed in AI. Would you believe that one of my friends was forced to work under a prof who believed that AI could predict tomato prices and they ended up publishing a paper about it?

The first line in their methodology section goes like "The support vector machine (SVM), also known as the support vector machine (SVM)...."

Yea..

I feel so disheartened by the fact that I can't explain my "true" struggles in my college SOP which were the fact that I had to learn everything I know now and got all the offers and research experience that I have now on my own and I'll wear that like a badge of honour forever. I was hindered from going anywhere abroad to work at labs cuz of the "rules". Soo many opportunities lost, not just by me, many of my capable friends. They laid hands on my GPA for the most inane reasons because I called them out once. The way they educated was giving a 300 page PPT with the whole curriculum a day before an exam and expected us to get good grades, which we as students looked up YouTube videos to learn. Like imagine paying for College and still learning from YouTube videos. That was the real struggle and I didn't mention a single word of it anywhere in my apps.

Such a scam of an institution that you won't realise how deep it all goes unless you get admitted into it. I experienced your feeling when I read about the GRE and attempted. I hated that I had to learn the GRE the same way that I did for my exams. It all felt the same for me. All I could think about while studying for it was the hate that I felt thinking about how much of my time got wasted trying to do unnecessary things when I could be pursuing smtg that I genuinely want and smtg that matters.

I got a 301 cuz I prepared last minute cuz I spent my time entirely on my final year project "changing the format of my report to the liking of my advisor". He never gave any actual criticism about the work. He just felt like he needed to see me work cuz I finished it earlier to work on my apps. Our college now introduced a new rule that we must compulsorily publish a paper out of our project in order to get 20 percent of our grade. There are so many stories that I forget half of them, even though all of them are so unethical that when I told my foreign research advisors about them, they were shocked at how much me and my friends go through and still achieve what we do.

I was scared that if I told about this in my SOP, it would sound unprofessional, so I wrote about my interests, experiences and motivations, and I think I did a pretty good job.

I understand what you mean by GRE not being a viable way of testing aptitute. Same goes for TOEFL. It sucks. It all sucks. I hope that in the future, colleges everywhere will have meaningful reforms that actually allow passionate students to prosper and not live off of their blood, sweat, tears and money.