My girlfriend’s brother is thinking of applying for doctoral programs in the US. He mentioned to me that he had to take the GRE. I asked him, a little shocked, if he had to take the English section of the GRE, and he said that as far as he knew he had to.
Well, I myself have never taken the GRE, but I’ve heard that the analogies and ready comp. parts tend to be quite difficult for we 'mericans.
I’ve heard a lot of Asian TA’s who speak much worse English than my girlfriend’s brother. I can’t imagine that they had to pass the verbal section of the GRE.
In addition to the GRE, most grad schools require the TOEFL for applicants who haven’t already been through an English-speaking degree program. From what I’ve seen, they’ll generally take into account your native speaker status when looking at your GRE scores.
My understanding is that it’s much easier to develop facility at reading/writing a language than it is to develop fluent speech/comprehension in the same language. Further IIRC: the written and oral components of language are more or less “treated” like completely different skills in the brain.
The foreign grad students at the major university I attend take the verbal GRE. I thought it was odd, too. It seemed to me like their verbal reasoning could be much better measured in their native language, and that English proficiency should be measured by a different type of test. Our foreign grad students are also tested on English proficiency, I should add. Also, it seems like the quantitative scores are given much more consideration than the verbal, even in social science fields.
In the natural sciences, the Verbal GRE scores aren’t really given any consideration at all, unless they’re horrendously low. If ETS offered the other two sections of the GRE separately, then I doubt that the verbal would be even required.