My understanding of the GRE subject test is that it’s something you might sit in order to go to graduate school. So for a PhD in chemistry, say, you might sit the GRE chemistry test if the School’s you were applying to asked for it. You receive a single percentage mark for it. Is that right?
It’s actually the chemistry test I’m interested in - Is it possible to generalise on how tough the test is wrt scores; like is 60% pretty average and anyone serious should be hitting 80+, or would it be more like 60 is v respectable and something like 90+ is off the richter?
This is more IMHO - but is it typical for the very brightest kids out of high school to be able to tackle the GRE subject test and score a good mark? ie prior to undergrad? Would that be relatively unusual, but still well-precedented, or really exceptional?
Realise this q calls for a lot of generalisations but thanks for any insight folk can provide.
The Subject GREs are scored in the style of the SATs, i.e., it’s nominally on a 200-1000 scale but the actual scores are within a sub-range of that. For Chemistry, the score range seems to be about 450–950. The percentiles for test-takers within the last few years are listed here (PDF) if you’re curious.
It’s technically true that a high-school-aged student could do well if they prepared correctly, but that’s like saying that anyone could play a Beethoven piano concerto if they practiced long enough: in practical terms, you’re going to be a lot better off if you’ve devoted a lot of your time to it. The GRE subject tests are designed to test the core of the undergraduate curriculum in a subject, and while a teenager could in principle learn all of this stuff, he/she would have to be an independent learner and well ahead of his/her cohort. The content of the test contains a hell of a lot of stuff that I don’t remember from my high school chemistry classes; your hypothetical high school student is going to have to be quite driven to learn all that stuff before they age out of high school. I’m more familiar with the physics test myself; I would estimate that a year of well-taught high-school physics would cover maybe about 30% of the questions on the Physics GRE.
The others are correct but let’s just break it down in the simplest terms. The GRE general sections test your general cognitive performance against all college graduates who wish to pursue a higher degree. You don’t need any particular subject knowledge to do extremely well or poorly on them because everyone from theater arts to math majors have to take it.
The subject tests measure general mastery of individual subjects at the undergraduate level. They are like a very general, comprehensive exam for the subject in question. It doesn’t matter if you went to Harvard or got your degree through a 4th rate school. It just tests things you should have been exposed to in that subject and then ranks you in percentile terms.
Many if not most graduate programs, especially for doctoral level programs do not take the subject tests all that seriously and many do not require them at all. They view it more like a subject trivia contest that doesn’t correlate that well to success in graduate school. The reason is that graduate school, especially doctoral level programs are specialized to hyper-specialized and general knowledge isn’t a strict requirement. It certainly helps to do well on the subject test but it generally less important than research experience, GPA, and the GRE general score.
I took the psych GRE when applying for grad school (PhD level), and felt so beat down afterwards that I wanted to cancel the results and retake it. My natural inertia helped me in that I actually did well when I received my score. It’s just that it felt amazingly hard. So yeah, I agree with Muffin’s assessment that it’s not something your average or even somewhat intelligent high schooler could do well at; you’d have to be quite bright and very highly motivated to be able to learn enough to score decently.
IIRC a 50th percentile score is considered pretty good for a domestic student. Students from countries with more of a memorization-style curriculum are expected to score higher.
I am not a chemistry professor, but one told me that he found very little correlation between the subject GRE score and success in grad school. Except for students from, say, China, where a low score was a red flag, although a high score still didn’t really say much.
He said his admissions committee considered the general test to be a better indicator. But still below research experience, recommendations (real ones from domestic universities), grades.
I have a whopping two data points on this, so YMMV.
Even for the general test, the GREs are basically a joke. They’re usually to weed out people who are completely incompetent in <field>. If you get above your school’s minimum threshold, it’s unlikely that your 157 score is going to be seriously compared to someone else’s 170 score, even though the percentile difference is ostensibly huge, unless it’s a down-to-the-wire tiebreaker scenario.
In fact, I’ve found there’s a clear inverse relationship between a school’s prestige in a field and how much that department gives a shit about your GRE scores. MIT, for instance, doesn’t even want you to send them your scores. CMU will throw them out if your GPA is above a certain threshold. Others like U Texas (good in Computer Science) give a sort of “it doesn’t really matter, there’s no minimum, but we still take them just in case.”
It’s only the really low-tier ones I’ve seen that really tend to go “we only accept people with a GRE higher than <x> on <subject>.”
I agree, although for science programs it looks a little weird if you don’t have damn close to a perfect math score, given that it’s easier than the SAT math section.
I took the GRE math subject test many years ago, and it was hard as fuck. I think that my score was somewhere in the 60% percentiles, and I was damn proud. The math test covers pretty much all subject areas that a math major might take in undergrad. The typical math major would only take classes in about 2/3 of those subject areas, so there would be a lot of questions on the test that the typical math major would have no idea about.
When I took the test, I was training for a marathon. I had to skip a scheduled 20 mile run to take the general test in the morning, and the subject test in the afternoon. After that I was so wiped out, that I would have much preferred the 20 mile run.
I don’t think that the subject test helped me get into my grad school (Florida for stats). One of my professors said that they just looked at the math score from the general part of the GRE to weed out people obviously bad at math. My application was rejected from one grad school, so they may have used the score, but I have no way of knowing.
I took the CS specific GRE when I was applying to grad school.
My feeling on it was that if you had taken the intro class in the particular topic a question covered (Like a question on TCP/IP and “Intro to Networking”), the questions were very easy. If you had not taken a wide breadth of classes, the questions were pretty hard.
So, for the AI/Networking/Theory questions, I thought they were a breeze. For the graphics and databases questions, I might as well have guessed. But that lined up exactly with the breadth electives I had taken.
No idea on how well that transfers to other subjects, but I think that’s why the CS GRE is dimly viewed. If you’re going to grad school for AI, nobody cares if you boffed the graphics questions.
It sounds like a lot of schools use the GRE tests as a prequalifier so to speak to make sure you’re not as dumb as a sack of rocks and the real competitive evaluation is in recommendation letters, prior coursework, GPA, etc. Are there any schools that use GRE scores as the primary means to admit, and prior coursework, GPA, letters of recommendation, etc. are used to screen out obvious idiots? E.g. are there grad programs where you have to have X prior credits in X Important Field with a GPA of 3.0, but having X+12 credits with a GPA of 3.5 doesn’t improve your chances that much, if at all, because the school really is judging you by your GRE scores?
You might be interested to know that ETS discontinued the Computer Science GRE Subject test earlier this year, due to declining demand. (Of course, the declining demand is probably a result of the “dim view” you mention in the CS community.)
In my case, I got a job at a university right after graduation and wanted to take grad level classes using my staff tuition remission benefits.
To be able to do this, you had to be admitted as an “Advanced Special Student” and to qualify you needed to either already hold a graduate degree, have five years of professional experience, have an undergrad GPA greater than 3.0 (on a 4.0 scale), or have scored above the 50th percentile on the GRE.
I didn’t have the first three, so I took the GRE and easily scored over 2000 out of 2400 (which was the format at the time). After a two semesters, I decided I wanted to start a MS program. The graduate director noted “your undergrad GPA is pretty bad [true enough, but I had a good time], but you have A’s in the two grad classes you took and your GRE is 400 points higher than the program average.” One of the things he said in the interview was “I really, really like that GRE score.”
So my case was unusual, but the GRE score is what probably got me admitted on paper. The MS program was in the dept I worked in and they knew me and that I would be successful. Which I was–I went on and was the first person in my cohort to get a doctorate.
I think that a couple of people are talking about the general GRE test, while the OP was specifically asking about the subject tests. The two are quite different.
I don’t have any experience with the subject tests, but I took the general test 3 or 4 years ago. I found it to be pretty much a joke…I thought it was easier than the ACT in high school. I thought it might serve a purpose to weed out the near brain dead students from wasting a grad schools admission resources, but I can’t see how any school could give much weight to it as part of an admissions requirement.
Interesting to look at the GRE chemistry sampler - the level seems very fair from my UK perspective, but it’s also very broad. In line with what people have said - you’d prob blitz the stuff you were strong on, but if you had a significant area of weakness in the subject it would be easily exposed.
Good point. Grad school requires several different things - subject matter knowledge, research skills, and thinking and logic skills. If you never got a good undergrad level of subject matter knowledge in your field, it doesn’t matter that you are really good at finding sources and making logical arguments, because you simply won’t understand what your sources say, you won’t be effective at developing methodologies, and it will be very difficult to make extrapolations on what might follow from your research because you aren’t familiar with any similar situations.