A motley medley of musings

[flamehail]

The GRE made be sad by giving me a second verbal section after I finished the math section and I thought I was getting to go home. And I don't know if that one was scored or the first one, so boo

Comments

[volith]

The math scores skew high because the section has to be really easy (high school level) to only test things that liberal arts majors are expected to know. So for people who have taken higher level math courses (calculus and above) every semester in college, and who use higher level math in almost every other course they take, getting an 800 is nearly guaranteed.

Since everyone is expected to know English, the verbal section is much more difficult, particularly for science and engineering students who aren't exposed to the same types of vocabulary in their course work as liberal arts students are. Also, I think liberal arts students are more likely to have studied root languages like Latin, so that increases the spread.

Honestly, having one GRE for all grad students makes almost no sense to me. Science and engineering departments will look almost exclusively at the math score, but it's relatively meaningless since the level of the test is so much lower than anything students need to know in graduate school. Humanities and arts departments will look almost exclusively at the verbal and writing sections. Two separate tests, perhaps with the vocabulary sections and math sections geared toward the test takers (maybe some science words for science students?, possibly even calculus and differential equations?, and matrices?), would be so much more logical.

[flamehail]

That makes sense. Of course, giving all the math people 800s on the math section would really skew the composite scores. Hmph.

I never studied the root languages (or at least, not the ones that help, like Greek, Latin, and French--for some reason, most of the fancy words are the non-Germanic ones ^_^), but I suspect that liberal arts majors tend to read more than science and engineering ones. Even if an s&e student loves to read and does so in his spare time, he's not doing so for class--that is, a liberal arts major's spare time and working time may go to reading, while only an s&e major's spare time does. Reading lots of erudite texts carefully is probably the real key to the verbal section, as that sort of thing assists in reading comprehension and sentence awareness (or whatever they call those fill-in-the-blank ones--that is, not just the mere definition of the word or even its connotations, but how it works with other words in a sentence (catching double negatives, for instance) and how those other words define a meaning even without the words left out) as well as vocabulary.

Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to lump it all together. Although, when you think about it, the people writing the tests are probably liberal arts people themselves (or worse, business people? The preponderance of business-oriented reading sections and essay prompts makes me suspicious, even though business people are supposed to have their own test), and they probably more or less write the tests for themselves, without thinking too much about science/math people.

For all the "logic puzzles" such tests include, logic itself doesn't seem to play a large role in standardized testing.