Speaking as a current grad student, this whole anti-test movement in America is a complete train wreck and will devastate the nation over the long term. Short t

Speaking as a current grad student, this whole anti-test movement in America is a complete train wreck and will devastate the nation over the long term. Short term, yes, lots of kids will get into lots of programs they are mentally unequipped for. But once they get in, a few will get their shit together and actually do well. Good for them! But the vast majority simply withdraw in the 3rd week before the W shows up on the transcript. The ones who don’t withdraw and don’t get their shit together are the toxic bunch. That’s a significant bunch. They are the ones who show up in labs & loudly say God I hate this class so much! They are trying to build sympathy for their case that the course is too hard. But perhaps it’s too hard because they are just not ready for it - haven’t taken the prereqs, or not doing homework, or not mentally mature. The SAT is supposed to test to precisely these things. But they’ve bypassed that hurdle. So now the TAs and adjuncts have to gently break the truth to them. That no, 7/0 + 5/0 is not 12/0. No I won’t give you a point for that because it’s the most obvious conclusion. I actually had to escort the kid to the Professor because he threw a tantrum and said stats is supposed to be easy, it’s mostly arithmetic! But in the grand scheme of things, undergrads are mostly harmless. They don’t produce research, they are just there to pass courses and join the economy as worker bees. The really harmful cohort are grad students who get into grad programs without passing the subject GREs. In my opinion, the Physics subject GRE and the Math Subject GRE are probably the 2 toughest exam papers we have in the USA. The vast majority of students cannot for the life of them pass it. The ones who do pass tend to do incredibly well in the grad courses. Especially the math GRE, which tests calculus, gradient, hessian, lagrange’s theorem, greens theorem, stokes, very basic algebra like elementary group theory, abelian & non commutative groups, cosets, fields & rings, basic number theory, chinese remainder, basic analysis like cauchy schwartz and mean value theorems. If you don’t know this material and get into grad school in some math-heavy discipline like math/stat/applied math/... you are going to struggle a lot. If it’s some lightweight discipline like OR/IE/Applied Stats/CS/Eng, ok maybe you don’t need to know this shit. But then, you shouldn’t also show up to graduate probability /statistics classes and then raise your hand in middle of lecture and say you don’t know how to compute the distribution of the ratio of 2 gaussians. This is exactly why have the Math GRE, so you can take a few practice tests for free, realize you don’t know how to integrate, and maybe work some calculus problems before you apply to grad school, not after. End of rant.