I don't get the GRE
There needs to be some serious recentering done with the GRE. I got my score report back today; observe:
Quantitative: 800/800, 94th percentile
Analytical Writing: 6/6, 96th percentile
Verbal: 730/800, 99th percentile.
So sure, those are all good scores, but what the hell? I get perfect on two sections and that's only around 95th percentile? The fact that many engineers I know consider anything less than perfect on math as a "bad" score clearly means that the test is too easy. Getting perfect should be extremely difficult, or else it's a useless test. And what's up with my verbal score? Usually, 99th percentile means mostly perfect, but I scored 70 points below a perfect score! To me, this means that the test is too hard, since it seems like barely anyone is scoring above 700.
Whatever, I'm not complaining. I heard that GRE scores are barely considered, and as long as you're above a threshold no one cares what you get. And at least it's not the MCAT, where the highest score is 45, but barely anyone gets over a 40.
posted by Megan @ 2:27 PM
1 Comments:
i think that these tests are overvalued. But i have a comment anyway
Getting perfect should be extremely difficult, or else it's a useless test.
Well, depends on what they're trying to accomplish. If the "cutoff" for the people using their scores are 80%, say, then maybe you want to make it easy to reliably distinguish between a 70% percentile person and a 90% percentile person. You may not care if you can't distinguish between a 95% person and a 100% person.
In their case i bet (totally unfounded speculation, though) that what they are optimizing is not discriminability between two types of people, but rather the repeatability of the test results. Because persuading people that they are measuring something is the first half of persuading people that they are measuring something relevant :)
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