I think the GRE is BS

[lavenderviolet]

@even_sven

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.

Unfortunately, I think college grades are pretty useless. Some people get professors who are more demanding than others are. Some students get As in classes by flirting or sleeping with the professor. I know a lot of people who freely admit they’ve cheated in class exams (one of my classmates in medical school made it through a year and a half of our classes before getting caught cheating on an exam and getting thrown out - aren’t you glad that there are standardized exams for physicians that guarantee we all have some basic knowledge of the field?). Whatever can be done to weed those people out and judge people’s true intellectual abilities, I’m completely in favor of it. Seems to me that testing someone’s ability to learn obscure words may not be directly applicable to their field of study, but it does show something about their skills at learning and applying new information.

[HazelNutCoffee]

@MsRobyn

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.

I’m pretty sure it’s not weighted that much. I did my MA at UChicago and the people in my program had a fairly wide range of GRE scores. I mean, they were all above a certain line but I think they ranged from people in the 99% to the 92%. Yet we were all accepted to the same program. I got the impression that they paid more attention to our writing samples and undergrad GPA than to our GRE scores.

[Snarky_Kong]

The graduate office at my school said they took the GRE to be your ability and your GPA to be your work ethic. I’m not sure how much they weigh each of those.

[Shagnasty]

I went to graduate school and have taken both the old and the new GRE. My work-study job in college was also heavily focused on preliminary screening of grad school applicants in the psychology department. I know a fair amount about psychometrics as well.

Here is what the different parts of a grad school application try to achieve:

1. Grades - this is supposed to measure how hard you work in class and how seriously you take your studies.

2. GRE - This is a type of IQ test. Like all IQ tests, it isn’t just a random group of made-up questions. It tries to differentiate people smoothly among a normal in terms of ability for these types of problems. If the test population statistics show that asking what is “1+1+1” can only be answered by the highest scoring students going on to an MIT Ph.D. then so be it. The statistics behind this type of test design are impressive in their body of work. Nobody knows exactly what all of this means but we do know that it measures something.

3. Letters of recommendation - these are meant to judge real experience and character.

All of these are taken into account but different schools place different weight on them. Any of them can help you get in but none of them are a sure thing. It isn’t uncommon at all for someone with an extremely high GRE score to get bumped off in favor of a more average one because of the other factors. We all know people that can ace an IQ test yet you wouldn’t trust as far as you can throw them when it comes to actual work.

[Ogre]

Take a few of the tests in one of the prep guides. That’s all the preparation you need for the GRE general test. It’s easy.

-Ogre, who had to take it again to get into PhD school, and knocked the bottom out of it.

[Telcontar]

@Frylock

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.)

This is how I studied for the verbal section. I think I was using a Kaplan book and it had a small number of pages (<10) that gave lists of conceptually similar words. I probably only studied off it for a few hours* but I found it enormously helpful. The math section was just practice…takes awhile to get a college senior to remember his or her 8th grade algebra and basic geometry.

Is the GRE worth something? I would say yes. If you can’t learn GRE math than I would seriously doubt that you can learn the math required for say econ or psychology; there’s a reason why programs like engineering have near perfect median math GRE scores. The verbal section is basically an IQ/study skills test. Verbal SAT works the same way and correlates well with first year college performance, which is some reason to take it seriously. It’s hard to know if the verbal GRE is likewise predictive of anything important because, especially in PhD programs, the important outcomes are difficult to identify. As I was told my first semester of grad school “An A means you should have spent more time on research.”

*night before: look up all words on an online dictionary and have them pronounced back to me. repeat with all unfamiliar words. repeat until all words are familiar enough. train to test location: stare at list.

[put_down_the_sabre]

I spanked the GRE (99th percentile on all sections) … needless to say, I like it and think it’s an useful indicator

pdts

[Snarky_Kong]

@put_down_the_sabre

I spanked the GRE (99th percentile on all sections) … needless to say, I like it and think it’s an useful indicator

pdts

You’re also a liar because it’s impossible to get 99% percentile on two of the three sections.

[ultrafilter]

@HazelNutCoffee

I’m pretty sure it’s not weighted that much. I did my MA at UChicago and the people in my program had a fairly wide range of GRE scores. I mean, they were all above a certain line but I think they ranged from people in the 99% to the 92%. Yet we were all accepted to the same program. I got the impression that they paid more attention to our writing samples and undergrad GPA than to our GRE scores.

I wouldn’t say that 92% to 99% is necessarily that wide a range. However, I have heard that for the most part, what matters with the GRE is that you score above a certain threshold, and after that it doesn’t really matter that much.

[NinjaChick]

@put_down_the_sabre

I spanked the GRE (99th percentile on all sections) … needless to say, I like it and think it’s an useful indicator

pdts

No you didn’t, at least not on the writing section.

[Smeghead]

@put_down_the_sabre

I spanked the GRE (99th percentile on all sections) … needless to say, I like it and think it’s an useful indicator

pdts

I got a perfect score on the math part, but it was reported as 94th percentile, because about 6% of the people who take it get a perfect score.

[Odesio]

@even_sven

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 just recently took the GRE and out of my entire college experience this has been the only one I’ve considered to be a complete waste of time.

[pepperlandgirl]

I had to take the GRE twice. The first time, I got a 6 out of 6 on the essay, and 600 on the verbal, but something like 420 on the math. This was very bad, because I needed a combined score of over 1200 to be eligible for a TAship. At the time, I was working for Kaplan as an SAT tutor, and so I was able to take the online GRE prep class for free. It was really, really beneficial. Both of my sections improved by 100+ points. I was really surprised and pleased by how much difference that prep class made. I haven’t worked for Kaplan in years, but I would still recommend it for people who are willing to pay a bit for a prep course.

[Helen_s_Eidolon]

I, too, hate the GRE. I did very well on it, as I do well on most standardized tests, but as someone mentioned above, it has no relevance on my ability to suceed in the real world.

What gets me is that it’s not only a stupid and pointless qualification, but that it’s also basically robbing us blind. The money that they ask for is obscene. I hate ETS with a passion.

Side notes:
As to the importance - I’ve been told that the GREs have more of an impact on funding allocation than admission.

As to classics students doing well on the verbal - I did well on the verbal, but I got way more out of my knowledge of French than my knowledge of Greek and Latin.

[Santo_Rugger]

The only reason I hated it is because I took it hungover as piss. It was hell getting through the verbal and writing sections, but at the time, I was pretty used to doing math problems hungover, so those weren’t a challenge at all.

[Algher]

Results of Studies
Taken as a whole, the evidence suggests that there is some correlation between GRE
scores and graduate achievement. But there is widespread disagreement about the degree
of correlation.

PDF link:

ACM Ubiquity

[stucco]

When I took the GRE it was on a computer screen that flickered slightly. They gave us headphones to block out noise: only one of the ears worked. One of the more unpleasant afternoons of my life.

At the time I was a college student in a medium sized city with four colleges. So where was the GRE test center? 30 miles away in an area not served by public transportation. Jerks.

Of course, I’m not done. I’m taking the Biology GRE this spring. At least it will be on paper.

[Indistinguishable]

@ultrafilter

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.

I suppose the thinking is that, beyond a certain level of mathematical sophistication, one is likely to take a subject-specific GRE for grad school purposes anyway, which will provide more useful information. Though it’s still pretty odd, I agree, to design a test where the upper six percentiles or so all clamp together.

[ultrafilter]

@Indistinguishable

I suppose the thinking is that, beyond a certain level of mathematical sophistication, one is likely to take a subject-specific GRE for grad school purposes anyway, which will provide more useful information. Though it’s still pretty odd, I agree, to design a test where the upper six percentiles or so all clamp together.

If you want to see odd, check out the distribution of analytical writing scores at the bottom of this document. Somebody screwed something up somewhere.

ETA: Granted, that’s a few years old, but based on the score report I got from ETS this summer, it shouldn’t be too far off.

[OhFace]

@Jackmannii

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.

I never said that a GPA is the sole best determination either, I just said the GRE doesn’t prove anything. I agree with what you said. I don’t have the typical 3.9 GPA that many psych Ph.D. applicants have, but I wish it were also noted that I took many difficult classes, some of which were even used by my school as pre-med weed out classes. I didn’t cherry pick my classes and professors but if I had I would have that almost perfect GPA.

I don’t typically do poorly on standardized tests, I did good on the ACT. I need a 1200 for Ph.D. programs and just can’t seem to break that on the GRE, but for other programs my score would be considered good. Regardless, even if I had aced it, it is irrelevant. The quantitative you can study for, and get good and quick at the particular math problems they use, but the verbal is ridiculous. Either you know the word or you don’t, and my intelligence should not be determined by my knowledge of obscure words!