6 ms·
GRE Scores By Discipline
- brentr 18y agoThat's close for physics and mathematics: 790 quant, 590 verbal for me.
- blackguardx 18y ago800 quantitative and 660 verbal and I'm an EE.
- Dilpil 18y agoInteresting 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.
- blackguardx 18y agoCan 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 18y agoWe don't talk much about discreet math.
- captainobvious 18y agoskreet skreet
- Dilpil 18y agoThe 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!
- jerf 18y agoWell, I admit I was somewhat skeptical about your claim, but at the risk of engaging in some confirmation bias, that is definitely an accurate description of how I got through my ACT/SAT verbal section. (Never took the GRE.)
- blackguardx 18y agoI see what you mean. The GRE verbal section uses very difficult vocabulary. Learning new vocabulary well enough for the GRE was a very daunting task for me. If you know the words, the test is easy. The trick is knowing the words.
- plinkplonk 18y ago" It's basically like acting as a compiler and finding type mismatch errors." This is exactly how I answered many questions in the Verbal section. (Score: 800 (verbal) 790 (quant) 6.0 (writing)). as for knowing difficult words, I found that reading a lot helps (vs memorizing word lists). You've seen most words in context before, which helps to distinguish between similar words with different shades of meaning and so on.
- ibsulon 18y agoThere 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.)
- ojbyrne 18y agoWhat'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. ;-)
- blackguardx 18y agoIn 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 18y agoIn 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.)
- yters 18y agoDo 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?
- ojbyrne 18y agoI believe a lot of standardized tests have added writing components because its a basic practical skill that people often arrive at university lacking. I may be wrong, but beyond just the score, I think the actual writing is also sent to the schools you apply to.
- yters 18y agoIn that case, the scale should be tougher. It isn't very useful when most are clustered at the top.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- Alex3917 18y agoThe fact that every discipline uses the same test for admissions says more about the quality of academia than the scores.
- ojbyrne 18y agoThere are eight additional subject specific tests related to specific discliplines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examination#GRE_Subject_Tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examination#GRE...
- dissenter 18y agoYes, 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 18y agoWell, that's probably the leftover liberal arts philosophy that seems to be so common among college administrators.
- time_management 18y agoAt 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.
- atarashi 18y agoVerbal 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.
- PAWebb 18y agoYeah. 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 18y agoI 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.
- dissenter 18y agoFunny, I heard a rumor that the only people who got 800s on the verbal section were foreigners. (Read: people who can't speak English.) The explanation was that they were the only ones willing to invest enough time to form-fit the ETS's method of verbal testing. In my own experience the verbal section of the GRE was entirely nonsensical. The vocabulary was difficult and exactly the type of vocabulary I would use if it was my goal not to be understood, but at least I could see how it might be a useful and reliable differentiator. Nobody uses these words often enough for them have any statistically meaningful shades of meaning. If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult to understand? The reading comprehension made less sense. I don't think it's possible to select a passage that has an unambiguous meaning and yet will be misunderstood by a statistically meaningful number of ambitious, college-educated people. So the question-making process must necessarily be corrupt. I recall many questions which wasted much of my time. Several possible responses, none of which are obviously wrong. I know which one I feel is right---or maybe I do. Which one does the GRE feel is right? Even on sample tests, where I could see the supposed answer, I would read and reread the passages, and understand little about what the correctness or incorrectness of the responses had to do with the meaning of the passage. I don't think you can presume to have an objective and clear-cut A or B answer as you might on the SAT. The granularity of college-level material is simply too fine. The only thing you can measure is how well you have matched yourself to the GRE's way of thinking, and that is not a particularly valuable expenditure of time.
- fgimenez 18y agoHow 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?
- SapphireSun 18y agoThey math questions are math questions and the verbal questions are mostly an obscure vocabulary test with a dose of reading comprehension.
- PAWebb 18y agoSounds easy. Why does everyone do so bad?
- SapphireSun 18y agoThe vocab is really obscure and even if you know a lot more words than the average person, you still get bitten. The only answer is to study very hard on a nearly completely useless subject.
- dissenter 18y agoWrong 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_interpretingscores.pdf http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpreting...
- aneesh 18y agoYou mean the math is intentionally "scaled up"? Or that the math is just easier & there is no effort made to rescale it? Given that these scores are used for comparison so often, you'd think they would normalize the scores so that a 700 means the same thing on both sections. For what it's worth, this is a trend on other standardized tests as well (including the SAT).
- 18y ago
- ekpyrotic 18y agoEgo 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 18y agoDoes 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 18y agoInteresting: Philosophy scored higher on Verbal than English/Language.
- yters 18y agoMakes 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 18y agoMy 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.
- yters 18y agoGood point. But, don't these grads also focus more on the effect of words than their meaning?
- kailashbadu 18y agoGRE 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 18y agoIs 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 18y agoCeteris 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 18y agoReligion > Education ... interesting
- neilk 18y agothe 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 18y agono, 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.
- yters 18y agoAnd if you want another (false) ego boost, calculate your iq from your gre: http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx
- tokenadult 18y agoIt'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.
- yters 18y agoYeah, 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.