I think the GRE is BS

The BBQ Pit
1

I just went to college. If you want a picture of what I do in college, it seems like looking at the record of what I did in college would be a pretty fucking perfect indicator.

I’m not taking the GRE any time soon, but plenty of my friends are. These are smart people. All are pretty much fluent in a couple languages and have years of experience. But they are all practically glued to silly flashcards of obscure words for the sake of the GRE. What exactly is this supposed to prove? That they know a lot of words? That they are willing to memorize stuff for no good reason?

Well, I suspect all it is supposed to prove is that they are willing to pay the GRE board.

2

I’ve been trying to study for the GRE myself. It’s been quite a while since I’ve taken a college-level math class, so I’m struggling with the math portion. I may end up taking a college algebra course just so I can get a decent score on the GRE.

Robin

3

Perhaps the words are so obscure that you’re supposed to be unable to really make a dent in knowing them by memory and are supposed to be able to figure them out by the roots of the word?

4

Ah yes, the GRE. I remember hating you so much.

Yes.

I’m not much conversant in psychometrics, but the point absolutely is to test obscure linguistic recall with a strict time limit. It’s basically like a crappy IQ test. They’re not interested in what you know about the world in general. They’re specifically trying to figure out how smart you are, so they’ve created a narrowly targeted memory test that happens to correspond quite well with highly literate native speakers. Then they added a dash of reading comprehension with a time crunch.

The foreigners I know who took the GRE (even one guy who got his PhD from Harvard) hated it with a bloody passion. It’s culturally biased and poorly designed, but it does do okay with measuring how quickly you can read and think.

University enforced monopolies are awesome, aren’t they?

Competitive grad schools get a lot of applications. They need some way to weed out people that doesn’t involve actually going through too much paperwork. For them, a standardized test fits the bill perfectly.

5

I used to work for a company that teaches people how to take the GRE and other similar tests.

What Snarky_Kong said is a large part of it. The words aren’t generaly terribly obscure, but yes, knowledge of roots and etymologies and so on will definitely help on the GRE, and it’s designed that way.

Back when I taught the GRE, my company did have flashcards students could buy, but they worn’t just straight word/definition flashcards. Rather each card contained a list of words that are semantically related. You weren’t supposed to memorize definitions, but rather, find ways to remember that this list of seven words are the “cat” words (i.e., words that mean roughly something having to do with the concept of cat.) (There was no actual “cat” group I’m just having trouble remembering an actual group.) This kind of very vague, rough, impressionistic knowledge of vocabulary often suffices. (When I read about this in training I thought it strange, but since then came to realize that actually, my own knowledge is organized in this way somewhat and actually does help me when I take tests like the GRE. I’d just never noticed before.)

It also helps to have even just the vaguest knowledge of connotations even if you’re not clear on exact definitions. Knowing a word has negative connotations, or connotations of murkiness, or whatever, can help on many of the GRE question types, like sentence completion. (It is a multiple choice test.)

The GRE is designed not to test a bunch of individual bits of knowledge but rather the ability to use one’s knowledge to answer questions about things which one may have no immediate familiarity with. So, for example, in the math section they’ll throw you a problem containing a whole lot of greek symbols and trig functions and whatnot, and you might panic–but the trick is, all the weird stuff cancels out and the expression really turns out just to refer to 1, or to 3x, or whatever. So while you may not be immediately familiar with the value of the greek-lettered constant, or the means of calculating the trig function involved, still, you can solve the problem if you have reasonable knowledge and understanding just of how math and numbers work in general. That’s the way the GRE is in the vocab section as well.

IMO if your friends are walking around with flashcards trying to memorize individual definitions of individual words, they are making a mistake. For the GRE, this is unproductive–indeed, I’m tempted to say it’s counterproductive because it wastes a lot of time.

-FrL-

6

I liked the GRE. Of course, it probably helped that I aced it, but still. Go GRE!

7

I went into a heavy humanities program, and I think half the new words I learned studying for the GRE showed up again in assigned readings in the first year or so. “Woo, heuristic, again! Prosopographical! I know that one!”

8

I think the GRE is most difficult for people who don’t read books for fun. Any decent reader will know most of the so called obscure words. I am not a native English speaker, but I aced it.
I made a smart decision to instead start working. Hah, I would probably be still paying off my student loans and looking for a job, if I hadn’t.

I don’t get the cultural bias part though, if people want to study in America, they should know the things in the GRE. It is really hard coming up with generic knowledge and skill tests, and there will always be those who complain bitterly.

9

I don’t remember any college-level math on the GRE. What I remember was high-school-level math, which I hadn’t taken since, you know, high school. Strangely, factoring polynomials didn’t come up all that often in my music degree.

10

I tend to ace general standardized tests (and have done so on the SAT, GRE and GMAT exams) and I have to say that in retrospect all they really demonstrated was my ability to ace general standardized exams. Real life, I’m not so good at.

That said, the Music Subject GRE made me sweat bullets. Hardest test I ever took (for which I was supposed to know the answers, anyway).

11

I loathe the GRE! It serves no purpose for gauging how I will do in a grad school program so I see no reason why it should be used as a tool for determining if I am admitted or not. One can ace the exam and completely fail at keeping up with a grad school program. This test determines nothing relevant!

And this would prove what regarding how I will perform in a grad program? Absolutely nothing.

I can see how it may relate to some graduate degree concentrations, but it is completely irrelevant to my psychology degree.

And even the subject test is a scam. There are three different levels of difficulty and your score is determined accordingly. What kind of bullshit is that?! So you get the hard one and freak out and bomb it, or you get the easy one and relax and get through it. It’s asinine!

12

My field is communications, for which precious little math is required. In fact, it’s the kind of field that attracts people who are bad at math.

For that matter, why can’t graduate programs waive the GRE for current holders of master’s degrees? I don’t understand why I need to prove that I can handle work when I’ve already demonstrated that by getting, y’know, a graduate degree?!

Robin

13

Contrariwise, one can “ace” one’s college courses (through general grade inflation and by cherry-picking ones with especially lenient graders) and then fail at doing graduate work because there was insufficient challenge at an undergraduate level.

People who complain bitterly about standardized tests tend to fall into two groups: those who do relatively poorly on them (often because they either have a lousy reading background or have slid through their coursework without picking up key information), plus those who think factors other than academic excellence should be of major importance in admittance to higher education programs.

If there are gripes about the GRE, the goal should be to improve it, not dismiss it.

14

Bullpucky. I scored a 2330/2400 on the GRE (back in the day when it was a three-part, 2400 point test) and I thought it was garbage. The “only people who failed at the GRE hate it” is a non-starter of an argument.

15

I can imagine it correlates with how quickly and easily one will pick up on new words and concepts. Also I can imagine it correlates with a general facility with reading difficult and unfamiliar texts.

However, I, as you, am just speculating about the correlation of GRE score wiht grad school performance. What do you know about that correlation?

-FrL-

16

In my case, neither is true. I generally do well on standardized tests and have no real problem with taking the GRE, if it’ll get me what I want.

What I am complaining about is the weight most universities give it. I’m coming in with high GPAs in both undergrad and grad, and I’ve got a completed master’s degree. I know there has to be some way to weed out the ninnies, but I’d prefer that it come from existing academic achievement, not from a test.

Robin

17

I do find it kind of amusing that the verbal portion of the GRE seems to be targeted at classics majors, and the quantitative portion seems to be targeted at high school juniors. Perhaps I would find it more amusing if the quantitative portion weren’t the only part that really mattered in my and similar disciplines, and the best possible outcome is that it doesn’t hurt your application.

18

My objection to it is that you must take it if you have any desire of achieving any sort of graduate-level work ever…and it costs $140. And if you ever want them to send your scores somewhere else, it’s $20 a pop. And if you want to check your scores by phone there’s some cost. And so on. Good grief.

19

How do you know how the GRE is weighted? I’m genuinely curious. When I was applying to grad schools last year, I felt totally in the dark about this. Although all of the schools I applied to required the GRE, none of them made it clear how heavily it was weighted in their considerations.

FWIW, even sven, I did okay, but not AMAAAAZING on the GRE and I got into every school I applied to, even though I was applying for a program unrelated to my undergrad degree. Probably it depends a lot on what program your friends are applying to, but I suspect that Peace Corps will give them a major advantage. There’s no way I would have gotten into the schools I did without it, I guarantee.

20

Hey, me too. Princeton Review?

I, too, hated the GRE both when I studying for it, when I took it, and when I was teaching it. In spite of the fact that I scored very very well. I do understand that competitive grad programs need SOMETHING, but I think that something should be a bit more applicable to the specific program.