GRE Scores By Discipline

http://www.arisbe.com/detached/?p=1905

by Jebdm • 18 years ago

50 72 18 years ago

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brentr• 18 years ago

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

blackguardx4• 18 years ago

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

Dilpil2• 18 years ago

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.

blackguardx4• 18 years ago

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?

ninguem2• 18 years ago

We don't talk much about discreet math.

Dilpil2• 18 years ago

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!

ibsulon• 18 years ago

There are many people who take the GRE for math and science who have English as a second language. This is less true for the humanities and social sciences (besides Anthropology, a major exception.)

ojbyrne3• 18 years ago

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. ;-)

blackguardx4• 18 years ago

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

scott_s• 18 years ago

In 2003, in fact, the year after this data was taken. (That was when I took the test, and I had the writing section instead of the analytical, LSAT-like section. Much, much easier.)

yters6• 18 years ago

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?

Alex39173• 18 years ago

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

ojbyrne3• 18 years ago

There are eight additional subject specific tests related to specific discliplines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examination#GRE...

dissenter4• 18 years ago

Yes, and let's not forget that a generalized test is still useful at the graduate level, for a variety of reasons. The one that comes to mind when you mention subject tests is that people sometimes switch disciplines. I have several friends who went from math to physics and vice versa. They intended to research problems which are closely related to what they've done in their own department but that just happen to be worked on by professors in the other. Does it make sense to hold a math major up to the standard of a physics major taking the physics subject test? No way---he couldn't possibly compare, even though he may be more ably suited to tackling a problem that's being worked on in the physics department. So having a generalized quantitative/analytical section is helpful in at least this case. If the physics professor looking at your application knows nothing about what his colleague is doing (your intended advisor), at least he has a reasonable indication you aren't a dunce.

Jebdm• 18 years ago

Well, that's probably the leftover liberal arts philosophy that seems to be so common among college administrators.

time_management• 18 years ago

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.

neilc• 18 years ago

This is absolutely true. Top CS programs don't even care about the CS GRE very much, at least in my experience (e.g. I didn't have time to write it before applying to grad school, and it wasn't a big deal).

Alex39173• 18 years ago

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

davi5• 18 years ago

I don't think this is true in neuroscience -- GREs are more than a formality.

tokenadult5• 18 years ago

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

What discipline is completely without use for reading skill, or for the kind of secondary school mathematics that appears on the GRE quantitative section?

Alex39173• 18 years ago

"What discipline is completely without use for reading skill, or for the kind of secondary school mathematics that appears on the GRE quantitative section?"

The GRE doesn't measure reading skill, that's what the NALS is for. The GRE verbal is just a test of how many wank words you've memorized. Same goes for the math test.

physcab2• 18 years ago

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

That is not necessarily true. Its a testament to how education is treated as a commodity by College Board and ETS. Academic programs don't care what your scores are. They only use them to help you get fellowships so they don't have to pay for your salary.

The real shame with the GRE is that it says nothing about the quality of the student. I knew someone who just failed their qualifying exam and is getting kicked out, even though he scored a PERFECT on the GRE and had external funding.

ssharp• 18 years ago

So what is the answer to this problem?

The GRE is a pretty generalized test. Most undergrad programs use either the generic SAT or ACT as their test factor - it's a efficient and useful way to measure a large group of people. The most important prerequisite for most graduate programs is an undergraduate degree in that field. How you performed (as well as the quality of the program you graduated from) is likely the most useful tool, so I can see how the GRE would be downplayed.

In some graduate programs, specifically law and business, what field your undergraduate degree is in isn't that important. I'm guessing this is why the LSAT and GMAT tend to weigh more in admission decisions than the GRE does.

atarashi• 18 years ago

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.

PAWebb2• 18 years ago

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.

sanj• 18 years ago

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.

harpsichord• 18 years ago

Normalizing the distributions would not change the rankings by much.

axiom• 18 years ago

Renormalized with equal weights. The only major change looks like philosophy jumped from 9th to 3rd.

fgimenez• 18 years ago

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?

SapphireSun2• 18 years ago

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

PAWebb2• 18 years ago

Sounds easy. Why does everyone do so bad?

dissenter4• 18 years ago

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...

physcab2• 18 years ago

The GRE math questions are almost the same difficulty as the SAT.

I would guess that if you're applying to graduate school, you've done a fair amount of reading and writing no matter what your major, so those questions are "tougher".

However, its not the same for math. There is still a general requirement, but the exposure to rigorous math is much more varied. Which reminds me, I kind of remember seeing a "Math for Dancers" class in the catalogue...

speek• 18 years ago

I think Math for Dancers would be an interesting class to take, even if you're majoring in a hard science/math.

Not all people think with only their brain, some people need their body to think. It'd be interesting to see how that actually works from the point of view of someone who math comes to naturally (sans-dancing).

ekpyrotic• 18 years ago

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?]

offs3t• 18 years ago

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.

dmoney• 18 years ago

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

yters6• 18 years ago

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.

decode• 18 years ago

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.

kailashbadu• 18 years ago

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.

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

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.

gojomo• 18 years ago

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...

callmeed• 18 years ago

Religion > Education ... interesting

neilk• 18 years ago

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.

niels_olson• 18 years ago

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.

yters6• 18 years ago

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

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

tokenadult5• 18 years ago

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.

yters6• 18 years ago

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.

GRE Scores By Discipline

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