With regards to the accuracy of the GRE in predicting success in graduate studies I found this article interesting (though it relates to the PGRE) -
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.9090/full/
@CupCakeMuffins An old friend posed a similiar question many years ago. She was wondering if everybody is paid the same, would there be such a battle for a place in the medical schools? I personally think not.
@Data10 Looks like this is a forest and the tree thing. I am looking at the forest; you are looking at the tree. Waiâs opinion is that over time and using different tests, STEM majors come out on top regardless. The CLA was created with strong input from employers who are looking for specific skills from graduates. I note with interest the same old pattern still holds. That is all I was trying to say.
As far as testing goes, they could just as easily go back to the old version where there was a V and a Q only. My only criticism is that it was so much easier to hit the ceiling on Q than on V. My suggestion is to bring some balance between the two; if 2%, letâs say, max out on V, then make it so 2% max out on M as well. This would make it much fairer, no?
@dfbdfb To be honest, social scientists are their own worst enemy. Their finest work is in psychometic, but it is social scientists, among others, that lead the charge in opposing it. (Same goes for stereotyping as mentioned in the article by Lee Jussim). If they donât have faith in their own methodology, how can I?
We donât have a birdâs eye view of reality. We are more like the three blind men and the elephant. All I can do is to use empirical evidence that are consistent with my observation and experience to construct my subjective reality. If not, others will impose theirs on me. Far too often, what I see is the regurgitation of CNN, Fox and other popular media as critical thinking. I donât believe so.
@gwnorth That article is an example of social criticism disguised as critical thinking that I mentioned earlier. Using the analogy of forest and the tree again, I can switch to the tree mode and criticize it item by item, but I wonât. I will simply comment on one of the items, as an example.
When these young scholars are saying their scores are low, how do I know it is not âfalse modestyâ talking. Based on the work of Lubinski and Benbowâs longitudinal studies, I doubt their opinion is valid.
I find the comments from the readers far more balanced.
Thatâs the sad part as most kids get pushed into medicine by their parents or attraction of a luxury lifestyle. If it was still a calling instead of just another lucrative profession, level of healthcare would be significantly better.
@Canuckguy, this is going to be my last response on this particular subthread, because I feel like itâs a sideshow distracting from the main strand of the thread, but: I really honestly donât get your utter worship of psychometrics. If you know the field at all, you also know that the validity of conclusions drawn by psychometricians are subject to the problem of data selection, even if nothing else, and that the criticisms of the field go well beyond that.
Like I said earlier, your own skepticisms (and, in the case of psychometrics, your own lack of skepticism) are not a sound basis for drawing conclusions about what findings should be accepted or rejected. Please stop trying to insist that your views of what methodologies are correct or not should be binding on any of the rest of us, or even on the discussion weâre having.
The reality is far more nuanced. If the test emphasizes verbal/reading/writing/âŠ, certain non-STEM fields that emphasize related skills tend to have the highest average, such as English. If the test emphasizes math/quant/âŠ, certain STEM fields that emphasize related skills tend to have the highest average, such as math. However, there are a huge number of exceptions to these general trends. Some specific numbers are below comparing 2016 SAT score by intended major and 2015-18 GRE score by intended field of study. I included the 2 most popular STEM major broad categories â engineering and biology, as well as math. I compared them the broad categories âsocial sciencesâ and âhumanitiesâ, as well as English.
Note that the order is nearly the same on both the SAT and GRE. English majors consistently have the highest average on the verbal and writing sections, followed by either social sciences or humanities. Engineering majors consistently have the lowest score, followed by biology or math. The order reverses for the math/quant section. Math majors consistently have the highest score, followed by engineering. English majors consistently have the lowest score, followed by humanities.
There are many contributing factors to this trend including students being more likely to favor fields that they are relatively academically successful compared to peers, curriculum differences, and societal/cultural/gender pressures.
SAT CR Average Score by Intended Major
- English â 576
- Social Sciences â 561
- Humanities⊠â 549
- Mathematics â 549
- Biology â 536
- Engineering â 528
GRE VR Average Score by Intended Field of Study
- English â 157
- Humanities⊠â 156
- Social Sciences â 153
- Mathematics â 153
- Biology â 153
- Engineering â 149
SAT Math Average Score by Intended Major
- Math â 621
- Engineering â 574
- Biology â 545
- Social Sciences - 545
- Humanities⊠â 530
- English â 521
GRE QR Average Score by Intended Field of Study
- Math â 163
- Engineering â 159
- Biology â 154
- Social Sciences - 151
- Humanities⊠â 150
- English â 149
SAT Writing Average Score by Intended Major
- English â 557
- Social Sciences â 544
- Mathematics â 544
- Humanities⊠â 537
- Biology â 524
- Engineering â 510
GRE AW Average Score by Intended Field of Study
- English â 4.2
- Humanities⊠â 4.1
- Social Sciences â 3.9
- Biology â 3.9
- Mathematics â 3.6
- Engineering â 3.4
They could remove any section, but they would need a good reason to do so. Why remove the section that is most predictive overall? Iâm sure grad programs care about the sections that are most relevant to their program, rather than just trying to sum all 3 scores in to a combined score somehow, even though AW is on a completely different scaling that VR and QR.
The VR and QR sections had the same mean of ~151 and SD of ~8.5 when the test was rescaled in 2011. However, the QR section has a significantly higher mean the VR today, and the QR score average continues to increase with each year. I believe the key reason for this increased QR over time is demographic differences in who takes the test. As summarized below, note that the mean VR and QR among US test takers is nearly unchanged since the rescale in 2011. Instead the increased QR average primarily relates to a larger portion of international students taking the test, particularly students from China. Chinese test takers have a higher QR average than the average of any major. Lots of test takers do rail the QR, but they are rarely test takers from the US. Assuming a normal distribution, a max 170 QR would be a >99th percentile score for US test takers, but only 84th percentile for Chinese test takers. The reasons why Chinese test takers do so well on the QR section are multifaceted and outside of the thread subject, so I wonât digress.
GRE Subscore by Country
US Test Takers (68%): 2011 Mean VR = 153, Mean QR = 150
US Test Takers (58%): 2017 Mean VR = 153, Mean QR = 150
Chinese Test Takers (6%): 2011 Mean VR = 146, Mean QR = 163
Chinese Test Takers (13%): 2017 Mean VR = 149, Mean QR = 165
Overall Average: 2011 Mean VR = 151, Mean QR = 151
Overall Average: 2017 Mean VR = 151, Mean QR = 153
Sure, one needs to consider the source. But there is a difference between ignoring peer reviewed research that doesnât meet your expectations and not blindly trusting everything that is said on Fox news.
I agree we are moving away from topic at hand, so let us get back on tract, shall we?
Here is another article that I love. It seems to dovetail with Andersonâs 3 step, as well as some of the data presented in this thread:
I am a pragmatist. I simply do not understand the obsession with elite schools on CC; I always focus on majors instead.
I help students learn to write for a living. And I was an English major.
I was at a benefit dinner this past weekend. I was seated next to an SVP at MetLife. I asked this person: what is the biggest frustration you have with your employees? The answer: they canât write.
If we think of an English major as reading old books, then no, thatâs not a particularly helpful major for a globalized economy. If we think of English as building the skill most in demanded in the typical job applicant, then English is not a bad choice at all. The same goes for Sociology. For all the power of technology, companies still need employees who can think in terms of what humans want and how those humans will behave.
This was interesting - my kid is a double major with one major on each list!
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Maybe he/she/it was just giving you the safe non-controversial answer. I wonder how his/her/whatever writing is??
Some of us have bought into stereotypes of others, consciously or unconsciously. We all have different skill sets. Some fuzzies (borrowing a term popular in some places to mean humanities or social sciences majors) can not only understand, but also add highly valuable perspectives to the issues in sciences and technologies. Some techies (meaning those majoring in STEM), on the other hand, are among the most critical thinkers of our time. Thereâre those who excel in both, regardless of what majors theyâve chosen.
Isnât one of the best majors for businessâŠpsychology?
^ In my neck of the woods the best major for business is business/commerce.
@sciencenerd It depends on what you mean by business. My understanding is that psych is good for HR. If you mean understanding behavior specific to markets, that would be econ. Generally, something quantitative may be preferred.
Business
âBusinessâ encompasses a wide variety of types of positions, which favor different types of majors. In the survey at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf , 158 employers in the category âbusinessâ rated new grad majors according to preference for hiring decisions. The top 5 highest rated majors are below. Psychology was not among the listed majors of interest. Business was among the most flexible fields for major of graduates. Only 12% of business employers said they looked for specific majors, rather than more generally valuing some majors over others.
- Accounting/Finance
- Business: Other
- Management & Administration
- Sales
- Computer Science
Business employers rated written and oral communication as the most frequently cited important general skill. The skill with the largest gap between need and have was adaptability / managing multiple priorities.
In my part of the woods, employers wants very specific degrees for their positions. They prefer ones with professional designations or at least working on one, over someone with an MBA even.
I am always looking for value in everything I do. So from my perspective, a degree that allows a graduate to earn a living wage immediately after graduation is the goal, not having to double down with an MBA that cost another 1-2 years of my life and more debt.
As far as program prestige goes, I am not sure. One of my kids thought it important; the other do not think so. Next week I will ask a sibling that is coming to stay for a day or two. She graduated with a first degree and an MBA from two of the most prestigious business programs in Canada. My suspicion is that it varies by the field of work. What is your experience, @gwnorth ?
@Canuckguy, Iâm an American but ShawWife is Canadian and ShawD began university in Canada so I looked at the Canadian university system quite a bit. One conclusion that I reached early was that Canadians think much more vocationally about university than Americans think about college. We looked at 7 or 8 Canadian universities and were touring Dalhousie and ShawD asked another young woman what she was interested in. I was surprised when she said, âI want to study kinesiology.â I thought, âWow. How could she at age 17 know that what she wanted to do was something as specific as kinesiology?â This was clearly a vocational choice â she wasnât thinking about discovering her intellectual passions. Nothing wrong with that but clearly different than the approach we came with.
On business undergrads, the US may be somewhat different from Canada. One of our cousins was dean of one of the business schools in Canada so I talked with him.
There may be more prestige in the undergrad business degree there. But, one of my nephews studied economics at McGill and took some a couple of the business degree econ courses and said they were more like economics appreciation than economics. I fully understand this as I began my career teaching quantitative subjects at a high-end business school and realized that I was teaching appreciation (how to look at and interpret results from things like linear regression or linear programming) rather than how to do regression or linear programming and certainly not how they worked or what assumptions really underlay the models. This is not pejorative as I think the students learned a ton â I was teaching them how to think rather than how to use tools. Many years later, they describe to me memories of things I taught them that they use in business.
My own bias, stated before on CC, is that one should learn to think, preferably in a number of ways, as an undergraduate and then get a graduate degree that is vocational. However, that path is not financially available to everyone. My son followed that path. My daughter did not â she went vocational after her first semester. Both are succeeding and pleased at what they are doing.
Incidentally, learning to think in a number of ways is not vocationally disqualifying. I am working now with a young kid (Iâd say 27 or 28) who was an undergraduate public policy and cognitive psych major who has been doing social media network analysis in the political sphere for several years and will be doing projects for my firm that are much higher value-added than he could do on his own, but his skill set made him instantly employable.
Isnât prioritization of preprofessional goals in university education predominant in the US as well for most students?
Most US university students study obviously preprofessional majors, and most commute to a nearby one from where they lived before. The forum demographic is not representative in many ways. Studying liberal arts without as much preprofessional focus at a residential university away from home is common on these forums, but not overall.
Canadaâs best known universities are also huge and located in high population places (where many can commute to), so there is less âneedâ to for many go away to university if one is seeking prestige or a particular major (although those living in sparsely populated areas need to go away to any university).
Kindasorta maybe? Or maybe not? It depends on what you call âpreprofessionalâ, innit?
Iâd suggest, fârex, that some business majors are preprofessional, some arenât. And is criminal science preprofessional? What about an English major whoâs pursuing that degree with the specific career aim of becoming an editor at a publishing house? Or a religious studies major who wants to become a minister?
Yeah, engineering and nursing majors are almost certainly preprofessional, but is biology a preprofessional major for someone aiming at med school, given that one can also go into med school after majoring in, say, dance? And if the dance major is heading to med school, if weâre counting the pre-med bio major as preprofessional, then why not count the pre-med dance major?
And so on.
Iâd suggest that we donât actually know enough to assess the claim, both because we donât have data thatâs granular enough but also in part because the important terms arenât actually really defined.
And some of the MOST pre-professional majors have the worst outcomes.
Recreation Management, Tourism, Court reporting, Hospitality from anything other than a top program⊠these lead to jobs which in many cases do not require a college degree, pay poorly, and have no upward mobility. Take a look at the academic offerings of any for-profit college and you will see a giant scam being perpetrated on Pell eligible students who believe that a vocational college degree is their ticket up from poverty. These are kids who could have gotten an 18 month certificate from a trade school or CC. These colleges arenât churning out history majors and political science majors⊠are their vocationally focused degrees somehow better?