🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan27.072142.6847@netcom.com>,
johnwu@netcom.com (John M. Wu) writes:

>In article <CEDMAN.93Jan26163825@capitalist.princeton.edu> cedman@princeton.edu (Carl Edman) writes:
>>It has been my impression as well that the analytical score is widely
>>ignored.  But I do wonder why that is so.  At least superficially it
>>would seem to me that this score would come closest to measuring an
>>important inate ability ie. to reason logically quickly and
>>accurately, while the verbal test essentially only measures vocabulary
>>which anybody can acquire by reading and the quantitative test doesn't
>>touch on anything which any reasonably awake eighth grader even in an
>>american high school wouldn't have learned regardless of talent.  Does
>>anybody know ?

The GRE Quantitative measure appears to be a little easier than
the SAT Math, which is a sad commentary on the amount of math
learned by the average college student.  It even has a more
"vocational" look (pie charts and sales graphs), instead of the
more IQ-test like questions which pop up on the SAT Math.  About
2% of GRE test-takers get the top scaled score of 800 on it.

The Analytical measure, which became official only about ten
years ago (the other two scales are over thirty years old),
has always been a bit shakier than the other two measures in
terms of reliability and susceptibility to coaching.  Still,
the puzzle questions which seem to dominate the GRE Analytical
measure comprises all of the questions on half of the Law SAT
(the LSAT version is a little harder).  The validity correlations
of the Analytical are about the same as Q or V alone.
>
>The verbal portion of the SAT/GRE measure how much reading a student has
>done in the past by testing the student's vocabulary to the limits.

I suppose it's not politically correct to say so, but in the
statistical sense, it also measures your genes, as well as your
economic background (which is related to how much good reading
you're exposed to).