

Ask HN: do contest/test taking skills correlate with research skills? - kunqiana

what are your thoughts on this?
======
mechanical_fish
You've neglected to name: a field, a sample group, and a definition of
"research skills".

Among the general population, skill at taking physics tests probably
correlates pretty well with skill at doing physics research -- both are
dominated by people who know something about physics.

Once you're among the people in the physics Ph.D. program at an Ivy League
university, the correlation is pretty weak.

Of course, to the extent that you measure "research skill" by things like
"number of papers produced" or "amount of grant money attracted", anything
that helps you get a more prestigious adviser at a prestigious university is
correlated with "skill". Ergo, it doesn't hurt to be good at taking tests. But
after you've passed your graduate qualifying exam, you can afford to stop
worrying about tests, pretty much forever. Real life -- even _university_ life
-- is about other things.

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neilc
No, they obviously do not. (Being bright is always helpful, of course, but
they are pretty different skill sets, I think.) This is supported by the fact
that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top
research PhD programs, in CS at least.

~~~
plinkplonk
"This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly
important for admission to most top research PhD programs, in CS at least."

Is this really true? (honest question). I can imagine GRE scores not being
important, but I always thought that good grades were a kind of baseline for
admission. As a thought experiment, do people with terrible grades,(but good
research backgrounds, say) get into a good PhD program in CS?

~~~
neilc
Well, for both grades and GRE scores, the assumption is that you're going to
do at least decently: if you had truly terrible grades, then that would raise
a lot of questions about your work ethic / interest in the subject / etc
(those questions might be addressed if you had strong letters of
recommendation from well-known professors who explained why you did badly, for
example).

But certainly the top schools don't simply take the students with the best GRE
scores or marks: there are many rejected applicants with perfect GPAs and
great GRE scores, but no research experience.

