The fact that every discipline uses the same test for admissions says more about the quality of academia than the scores.
Well, that's probably the leftover liberal arts philosophy that seems to be so common among college administrators.
GRE Scores By Discipline
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#12The fact that every discipline uses the same test for admissions says more about the quality of academia than the scores.
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.
Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#13Interesting 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.
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?
We don't talk much about discreet math.
Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#14Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#15The fact that every discipline uses the same test for admissions says more about the quality of academia than the scores.
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.
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).
Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#16The fact that every discipline uses the same test for admissions says more about the quality of academia than the scores.
"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?
Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#17Verbal 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.
Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#18Interesting 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.
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?
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!
Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#19How 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?
Re: GRE Scores By Discipline
#20How 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?
They math questions are math questions and the verbal questions are mostly an obscure vocabulary test with a dose of reading comprehension.