「RANT」 Graduate School application process at a traditional public Uni

First I need to say, I have lived here for a while and love it here, and have actually never made a post but this was one crossed the line….

Last week I did my college application for graduate school, where I am already a student. I already did an application online, so all my info is there. After this I had to do a handwritten application in addition to the portal. The hand written application requires you to write your job history and school history, which is already provided in the online application. In addition to this hand written and online application they require a separate resume with job history and school history. If that isn’t enough, I am on a scholarship which, is already shown the original online application, but I needed a second random document printed from some machine as additional proof. IF THIS WASN’T ENOUGH, you have to take pictures of yourself and paste it onto the 3 documents, when you already have provided a picture online and copies of ID, which truly do not need pictures, because you have to provide your ID when taking your test.IT CONTINUES. You cannot physically bring the application and hand it to office that receives it. You must pay 1200 yen to mail it in within a very specific time slot. (in the same college in a different office you can hand it in, so this is not universal, WHY?)To make things worse, the application uses wording most Japanese cannot even understand. I can read Japanese, but bc of some strange word usage, I asked my gf who is Japanese and she could not understand so I had to call and ask about what to write down. Even the woman on the phone basically said in Japanese that the sentence I was confused on is “difficult to understand even for Japanese students”.This process which took a week could have taken 1 hour and give the office a whole week of vacation for free.To go one step further if you are a native speaker they require a TOEFL or TOEIC. The TOEIC test for an average native high school student graduate is absurdly simple. Imagine having a Japanese student whose graduated college entering an advanced degree in England to study science IN ENGLISH and being required to take a Japanese proficiency test that is horrible at measuring actual ability of the language. The main point here is my Degree is in Japanese.Why the hell isn’t it just done online? Why can’t it be handed in physically? Why do we have to write the same thing 5 times? Why do we have to provide additional documents when the proof is already clear? Why are there sentences that natives cannot even understand? Why do you need a pointless test?

I think this horrible process is to weed out those who really want to join. However, most of all I think it is just more with keeping with tradition. All foreign students I have talked to here have been confused and truly despised the process here, but it’s not going to change anytime soon.

This was just a rant, I hope experiences at other Unis are not so bad.