

GRE Scores By Discipline - Jebdm
http://www.arisbe.com/detached/?p=1905

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atarashi
Verbal and Quantitative have vastly different distributions. Simply adding
them together favors those in quantitative fields.

I think that the smaller variance in verbal scores should have tipped him off.

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PAWebb
Yeah. This is true, and it's the first intelligent thing anyone has said in
this thread. The verbal section is much more challenging. And it is not word
memorization, although that is part of it.

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sanj
I talked to the dept head in aero at MIT during the 90s and he told me that
the verbal section of the GRE was the only correlation he'd seen to success.

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dissenter
Funny, I heard a rumor that the only people who got 800s on the verbal section
were foreigners. (Read: people who can't speak English.) The explanation was
that they were the only ones willing to invest enough time to form-fit the
ETS's method of verbal testing.

In my own experience the verbal section of the GRE was entirely nonsensical.
The vocabulary was difficult and exactly the type of vocabulary I would use if
it was my goal not to be understood, but at least I could see how it might be
a useful and reliable differentiator.

Nobody uses these words often enough for them have any statistically
meaningful shades of meaning. If the goal of communication is having other
people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely
because they are difficult to understand?

The reading comprehension made less sense. I don't think it's possible to
select a passage that has an unambiguous meaning and yet will be misunderstood
by a statistically meaningful number of ambitious, college-educated people. So
the question-making process must necessarily be corrupt.

I recall many questions which wasted much of my time. Several possible
responses, none of which are obviously wrong. I know which one I feel is right
---or maybe I do. Which one does the GRE feel is right? Even on sample tests,
where I could see the supposed answer, I would read and reread the passages,
and understand little about what the correctness or incorrectness of the
responses had to do with the meaning of the passage.

I don't think you can presume to have an objective and clear-cut A or B answer
as you might on the SAT. The granularity of college-level material is simply
too fine. The only thing you can measure is how well you have matched yourself
to the GRE's way of thinking, and that is not a particularly valuable
expenditure of time.

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davi
_"If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why
would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult
to understand?"_

Once in a while you meet someone else like yourself and experience pleasure
communicating at high baud.

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dissenter
Really? I take your point to mean that two smart people can communicate better
using obscure vocabulary when they are communicating only between themselves.
High baud necessarily implies higher average information throughput, so there
would have to be a significant number of these words in the communication.

Could you point to some examples of letters between two famous people using
this method?

Most notable people seem to prefer simple vocabulary, and in fact, many of
them go so far as to recommend it. The people who prefer complex vocabulary
(cultural studies journals, intellectuals) do not seem to accomplish anything
of value, and indeed they are routinely accused of being obscurantists.

(Ground rule: scientific jargon excepted, since it is not a part of the
vocabulary. But, feel free to look at letters by Newton, Einstein, Godel,
Hilbert, anyone really.)

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davi
It has nothing to do with a preference for complex vocabulary.

When I talk to someone I know has a large vocabulary, I am free to use the
best word that occurs to me, and if they think I'm up to snuff, they are free
to do the same thing. This makes for a more pleasurable conversation.
(Assuming we're actually trying to say something to each other. But if the
motivation is to show off, or engage in ego jockeying, that's boring.)

I guess it's more accurate to say that baud rate surges transiently when a
rare, but exceptionally precise word enters this sort of conversation.

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Alex3917
The fact that every discipline uses the same test for admissions says more
about the quality of academia than the scores.

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time_management
At good schools, the GRE is just a formality, especially the general test.
Research experience and recommendations are more important. Top math and CS
departments don't really care about the GRE general at all.

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Alex3917
So the "best" schools make you take a test they don't even care about? Yeah,
they sure sound really good to me.

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eli
Well, no, it's not required everywhere. And the GRE isn't meaningless, it's
merely one factor among many.

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dmoney
Interesting: Philosophy scored higher on Verbal than English/Language.

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yters
Makes sense, philosophers are more interested in analyzing the nuances of
words than writers. Writers focus more on the effect of words and philosophers
focus more on the meaning of words.

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decode
My understanding is that English Lang & Lit grad students are not studying to
be writers. They're studying to be literary critics and English professors.
Writers get MFA's in Creative Writing or Journalism.

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yters
Good point. But, don't these grads also focus more on the effect of words than
their meaning?

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ojbyrne
What's the analytic scale mean? I have an analytical writing score but it's on
a 0-6 scale.

800 quant, 710 verbal. And 46 years old when I took it. ;-)

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blackguardx
In the past (around the turn of the century), the analytical section consisted
of logic and reasoning problems. It was probably similar to some of the LSAT
questions.

They converted it to a writing section relatively recently

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yters
Do you know why they changed? Seems like the previous version would be better
than the writing section. While most score 5-6, the older scores look like
more of a differentiator.

People are moving standardized tests away from being iq tests, for some
reason. Why don't they just replace the SAT and GRE with a real IQ test?

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ojbyrne
I believe a lot of standardized tests have added writing components because
its a basic practical skill that people often arrive at university lacking. I
may be wrong, but beyond just the score, I think the actual writing is also
sent to the schools you apply to.

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yters
In that case, the scale should be tougher. It isn't very useful when most are
clustered at the top.

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neilk
_the total scores for the scientific disciplines are consistently higher than
those for the humanities and social sciences;_

Economics scored #4 and it's not a science. That blows away any credibility
this might have.

Economics does have equations and an analytical approach, but its empirical
foundations and usefulness are quite dubious, compared to say, civil
engineering, or medicine. I would think that medicine would require a very
high degree of empirical rigor, and it must be put into practice every day.

This isn't a list of what occupations are useful or even intellectually
honest. It's ordered by complexity of abstraction.

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niels_olson
no, it's ordered by score.

Also, students applying to medical school don't take the GRE. They take the
MCAT. If you are interested in medicine and taking the GRE, you already
failed, which may explain the disproportionately low score.

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kailashbadu
GRE is a test of your perseverance, tenacity, ability to stay focused and work
towards a goal more than it is the test of how well you speak/understand/write
English.

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ekpyrotic
Ego boost or what?!

I study physics, math, and philosophy. They each take a top in category award.
Know what? I'm going to treat myself to a coffee.

[I'd like to see the same done for the individual branches of philosophy. I
have a feeling the moral philosophers drag us down. What? Who said that?]

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fgimenez
How is it that the average verbal scores are so much lower than math? A math
major averages 714 on quantitative whereas an English Lit major averages 573.
Is the math that much easier, or do we not speek so goode nemore?

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SapphireSun
They math questions are math questions and the verbal questions are mostly an
obscure vocabulary test with a dose of reading comprehension.

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dissenter
Wrong answer. (Though a true statement.)

The tests are scaled differently. That's all there is to it.

[http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpreting...](http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpretingscores.pdf)

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aneesh
You mean the math is intentionally "scaled up"? Or that the math is just
easier & there is no effort made to rescale it? Given that these scores are
used for comparison so often, you'd think they would normalize the scores so
that a 700 means the same thing on both sections.

For what it's worth, this is a trend on other standardized tests as well
(including the SAT).

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offs3t
Does anyone know where I could find data on more recent scores, or scores
preceding 2002? I'm just curious to see if there any trends and whether the
standings have changed much in the past 10 years or so.

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Dilpil
Interesting that Math and Science graduates barely scored lower on the verbal
sections. I've always felt that the so called verbal section is really more of
a discreet math/type theory test plus vocab.

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blackguardx
Can you explain?

The verbal section consists of antonyms, analogies, sentence completion, and
reading comprehension.

I don't know much about discreet math. How does it apply in this case?

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Dilpil
The antonyms and analogies are usually a matter of figuring out which of the
answers is a valid type- for instance, most of the antonyms will have 2 or 3
words that actually mean the opposite, but only 1 will be the same figure of
speech, and usable in the same type of sentance. It's basically like acting as
a compiler and finding type mismatch errors. As for the sentence completion,
the task is to memorize a set of rules, look at an input, and once again act
as a compiler. Reading comprehension is probably the most 'verbal' of the
verbal questions, but once again math and CS students have the advantage here:
we've been reading obtuse texts looking for the answer to a specific question
for years!

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plinkplonk
" It's basically like acting as a compiler and finding type mismatch errors."

This is exactly how I answered many questions in the Verbal section. (Score:
800 (verbal) 790 (quant) 6.0 (writing)).

as for knowing difficult words, I found that reading a lot helps (vs
memorizing word lists). You've seen most words _in context_ before, which
helps to distinguish between similar words with different shades of meaning
and so on.

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yters
And if you want another (false) ego boost, calculate your iq from your gre:

<http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx>

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tokenadult
It's hilarious that sites that purport to calculate IQ scores from other test
scores generally don't mention error in estimation in either kind of test, nor
do they mention regression to the mean.

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yters
Yeah, it's quite a sketchy methodology. I know his stats are false because I
come out with a 150 IQ, which I definitely do not have. Plus, Mensa doesn't
consider the modern SAT or GRE to correlate with IQ.

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mattmaroon
Is it me, or is education being on the bottom uplifting? I feel like we'd have
a serious problem if it were on top.

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gojomo
Ceteris paribus, sure. But if the field of education attracted better talent
-- provided better rewards for excellence -- a lot of our other
social/economic problems might be lessened. Sadly, it's not our A-team or even
B-team educating the multitudes...

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callmeed
Religion > Education ... interesting

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brentr
That's close for physics and mathematics: 790 quant, 590 verbal for me.

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blackguardx
800 quantitative and 660 verbal and I'm an EE.

