One, the test never really accurately measured “aptitude”.
Two, they haven’t even pretended that it did since at least 2005, when they got rid of analogies.
Three, the test was totally revamped last year and very explicitly tied to college-ready skills, not aptitude.
Four, literature from schools is literally the poorest way possible to determine your chances to get into a particular college. They send out so much stuff to everyone. It doesn’t mean much.
Five, focused prep is pretty powerful at raising scores. College Board has basically conceded this by making free prep available through Khan academy.
Thanks for the info. I still have my original GRE score report sheet but lost my SAT one. I’ll look into getting a copy.
Things have changed so much in the time since I took the GRE. E.g., I scored over 800 on the Math part. Some time after they set the max score to 800. (And my Math SAT score was 799. Between that and taking the GRE they went to rounding to multiples of 10. Could’a got an 800!) They have also rescaled the tests because too many people were getting top scores. So a 900 on an advanced test isn’t the same as a 900 now. (I got a 990 which is still the top advanced test score, AFIAK.)
Yeah, I’m good at multiple choice Math (and Science) tests. But throw me into an essay test or something and it’s a different universe. Tests are great at telling you how good you do on that test.
I really don’t remember much about the questions except for a few noticeable ones. On the advanced Math GRE I remember 3. One was an awful double integral that stumped me. But I later saw that it was probably a trick question you could figure based on signs alone. 2 others were flawed and had no correct answer. Similarly the only question I remember for the SATs was a simple two fractions divided by two fractions question where none of the answers were right. (Hence my pathetic 799 I’m guessing.)
There’s a lot of resources for SAT/GRE training. It really does help. Disclaimer: FtGKid1 used to work in that field, creating sample questions, tutoring, etc.
Speaking of … FtGKid1 took the SAT in middle school as part of regional talent search/competition thing. Definitely not applying to college at that time.
Indeed, when I took it as an eighth-grader, I was very surprised that my score was in the 99th percentile on the trig section, because I didn’t know any trig. Or rather, I knew a little, but not by that name: What I knew amounts to knowing that for angles less than 45º, tan is less than 1, and for angles greater, it’s greater than 1 (though again, I couldn’t have expressed it in those terms). And for a multiple-choice test, just that much knowledge is often enough.
How about other types of tests, such as taking the bar exam just to see how well someone who isn’t a law student would do. Or a real-estate exam? Would they let you into the room? Maybe I could set a new low score.
The bar exam is administered by the bar, and is a professional certification, unlike the SAT which is basically an aptitude test.
Real estate requirements vary by state but generally you must complete a certain number of hours of professional training to qualify to take the exam.
You didn’t ask but other professional certifications (like the PMP, PE) have education requirements and work experience requirements before you can qualify to take the exam.
I did once grade a physics final exam that was taken by a student from a different university, apparently just for the lulz. The scary part is, he didn’t even get the lowest score.
As noted, you can take the GRE (or SAT) at any time just by paying money. I have taken it a few times when I considered going back to graduate school (my scores have been remarkably similar across time but some schools want them to be current within 5 years or so).
The big difference between now and the first time I took it is that most people take an individual computerized adaptive version these days rather than the older, written test (the written test is still offered in some places but only on certain dates). The computer version of the GRE works differently than the paper version. It doesn’t ask any individual all the questions. Instead, it starts you off with medium difficulty questions and then adjusts the difficulty of further questions either up or down based on how well you do on those. It tries to determine your skill level for each section dynamically. If you answer most hard questions correctly, you will never be presented with an easy question and vice versa.
To take the computer version of the GRE, you just schedule an appointment at one of the many Prometric test centers around the country (I believe they offer many other types of tests as well). You can take the test every 21 days if you want to with a max of 5 times in a rolling year. IIRC correctly, you get some of your results on the spot and within about 2 weeks for the parts like writing that are human scored. I don’t ever recall being asked about why I was taking it.
I took the SAT as part of a group of five people with varying degrees of education, all of whom had been out of high school for a period of time, I think it was at least ten years. There was a high school graduate, I had the equivalent of an associate’s degree, someone else had a bachelor’s degree, we had an master’s degree in there, and we had a PhD.
It was for an article that the local newspaper was running back in the mid 1980’s. They asked for volunteers to take the test and did pre and post results interviews. At this late date I don’t remember what point the article made, if any, and I don’t remember how the scores stacked up except that I busted the curve. With my crappy two year community college degree technical degree I got the high score out of the five of us. 760 verbal and 660 math. I’d been out of high school around 15 years by then. Anyway, with the 1420 SAT scores I got into a part time bachelor’s program and eventually finished, so I guess it all worked out.
Congrats, Bill! As a teacher of smarty-pants “two year community college degree technical degree” students, I’m amazed how intelligent some of them are.
So, nobody here part of the Dreambox Community? They are all part of a massive multiplayer sports pool, and the loser has to take the SAT (last year it was the ACT, actually). They have to study for weeks, dress up in a suit, sharpen their #2 pencils, spend the day with nervous high schoolers… and there’s a lot of pressure to beat their original back-in-the-day scores.
About 25 years ago, my daughter was working for Kaplan (the test cram outfit) and they paid for to take the MCAT (med school admission test) and remember as many questions as she could. There was no obstacle raised to her taking it. Her score was in the 97th percentile. But she was not interesting in going to med school.