tommie317;842078951 said:
Yea but Einstein would no doubt ace the math section. Many jobs require quick yet complicated math/English intelligence: financial, consulting, law, engineering, etc. don't kid yourself that high scores do not correlate to academic and later on, professional performance, assuming EQ is the same (which is where grades and extracurricular come in)
Re Einstein: this is precisely my point. The math section of the GRE does a good job of assessing whether a potential student understands high school math. But these skills are only relavent in so many fields.
In my discipline, there is no correlation between high GRE scores and subsequent academic performance.
In our Department, GRE scores are one of a number of factors evaluated for admissions decisions. They are given heavy weight, on par with grades, writing samples, publications, and letters of recommendation.
But once a student is admitted, funding decisions are made almost exclusively based on GRE scores. This is not unusual. This is how most departments do it.
The admits with the higher scores are eligible for advanced funding offers (i.e. "prestigious fellowships"). The difference between a prestigious fellowship and a normal stipend is anywhere from $7,000-$16,000/year, plus better health coverage and several other perks (such as recognition and preferential consideration for smaller research and travel grants).
Of the students who have failed to pass their comprehensive examinations or get their dissertation proposals approved over the last 10 years, 100% of them have received these advanced funding offers because they had impeccable GRE scores.
They did amazing on the test. Superb actually. 99% in verbal, 6 on the writing, and 85%+ on the math. And knowing many of these students, I can tell you that they worked very hard on preparing for the exams and also spent a lot of money on test prep classes. But in the end, these skills did not translate into them being able to ace their seminars, pass their comps, or get their proposals approved.
Bottom line: it is impossible to tell if a student will be a decent historian from making him sit at a computer at a test-taking center for 3 hours and fill in multiple choice answers and answer a silly writing prompt question.
In my field there is little correlation between these scores and success in earning external fellowships, prizes, passing comps, publishing articles, and getting a tenure track job. As long as a student gets a 5 on the writing and a 80% plus on the verbal, I could care less what his or her scores are.
So why are they used? For math-heavy disciplines, I agree that it is important to ensure that a student understands math. But the GREs only test for high school level math. Thus, the tests aren't that helpful apart from weeding out the terrible students. For other disciplines, a student must have a command of basic vocabulary and how to write a grad school level essay. But again, the GRE is not super helpful in this area apart from weeding out the absolute worst applicants.
The real reason they are used is twofold: First, the alleviate selection committees and administrators from the time and hassle of really digging into an applicants file. They make things really easy by providing a simple number to make incredibly important decisions. Second, ETS and the test prep companies make an absolute fortune off these tests. We're talking ridiculous money. The test itself is expensive, not to mention the cost of sending one's scores to each school that you are applying to. But if you want to do really well, you at least need to buy an expensive test prep book, or better yet, spend several thousands of dollars on a course at Kaplan or Princeton review.
For my Discipline, it would be much better if the student were to use this money to go learn another language or to conduct archival research.