Blog – The Renegade Coder

Okay, you caught me. This is a bit of clickbait, but it's in reaction to some real conversations folks are having about the role of the GRE in admissions. Let me vent a minute. What Is the GRE And What Happened to It? The GRE is a standardized test that people take to get into graduate school. If you're wondering, it's very similar to the SAT and ACT that high school students take to get into college. Ultimately, the requirement to take the GRE went away for the most part due to COVID, as universities needed to find ways to get students to apply. Interestingly, the requirement to take the exam has yet to be reinstated at a lot of universities despite COVID vaccinations being widely available. As a result, many folks are arguing for why it should be brought back. For instance, I recently saw this tweet by Andrew Kern, a professor at the University of Oregon: every graduate student application season i'm reminded-- cancelling the GRE was a horrible idea @pastramimachine Perhaps because Twitter is a conservative cesspit now, Andrew received basically no backlash for this tweet. So, I wanted to take a moment to just vent about this mentality. Why Are People Saying It's Needed? Generally, Andrew makes the argument that the GRE is the only "common data point" between applicants. This is, of course, in contrast to letters of recommendation, transcripts, and essays—among whatever else you might see in a graduate student's application. A handful of people backed Andrew up by making arguments like: All other aspects of an application are more biased than the GRE. Testing provides a chance for applicants who did not perform well in other areas. People who can't pass a single test are unlikely to succeed in academia (or alternatively, those who go through the effort of preparing for an exam are more likely to succeed in academia) In other words, there are a lot of folks in favor of bringing back the GRE as the gold standard for graduate admissions. Naturally, I don't agree. Why Shouldn't It Be Reinstated? If the argument is that the GRE is the best or only way to differentiate between candidates, then I would argue that it's a bad idea to reinstate it. To me, it's the cowards way out of having to make difficult decisions around who to admit. You are simply deferring your decision to a test score, which is known to really only reinforce privilege. Of course, the counterargument is that all other ways of differentiating candidates are somehow worse. Therefore, my solution might be to institute a lottery. With how many qualified applicants there are, there is just no way that a lottery could perform worse than current programs at selecting applicants. Clearly, faculty cannot be trusted to make admissions decisions. Even better, a lottery would upend the established system which perpetuates privilege. Even better, since advisor fit is probably a greater predictor of success than a test score, maybe faculty should have to recruit their own students. Again, test scores seem like a really lazy proxy for getting to know people. Though, I am aware that getting to know prospective students would just be another responsibility on a long list of faculty responsibilities. Of course, I don't foresee this argument ever stopping as long as objectivity and meritocracy are deeply-rooted ideologies in STEM. Everyone wants to have some quantitative metric they can point to as a means of reducing complexity rather than dealing with reality. I know it because I've seen it in computer science. We cut out otherwise excellent researchers and educators on the belief that test scores are the best metric we have. In an ideal world, if universities weren't run like businesses, we would admit grad students on an apprenticeship basis. If through practice we find they are not cut out for the work, then at least we tried. Right now, we don't even try. What's the Moral of the Story? Ultimately, I think we sort of overthink who's qualified for grad school. Part of that is probably because the system is upheld by products of said system. As a result, faculty see themselves as uniquely intelligent, often to a narcissistic degree, when the reality is that a third of the world could probably survive and even thrive in academia. Your average academic is not Einstein—they're just resilient. Likewise, I think we have the wrong idea about what education is even about. It's not about recruiting and retaining the best students. After all, the institution doesn't have to really do anything then, right? That student is going to succeed no matter what. Just hire them already. It's also not about getting the hardest working grad students to maintain a research lab, nor is it about producing academics who are going to bring in grant money and generate publications. Education is about inspiring curiosity and expanding our knowledge of the universe and everything in it. It's about solving real world problems and making real world progress. It's about connecting brilliant minds and furthering the human species. None of that has anything to do with ranking individuals by test scores. With that said, I don't actually oppose the GRE. If you want to include it as a part of a holistic review process, I think that's fine. In fact, I think more data is better. The problem I have generally is that it seems to be the only data point anyone cares about. Certainly, in that case, it's just going to be a tool for filtering to make the admissions process easier on the committee. That doesn't seem like a great way of dealing with people's lives. On top of that, there are a variety of problems with the exam itself that I didn't even touch, which mostly stem from access. Of course, I won't get into all that because it requires digging through the evidence and producing a coherent argument, and I'm just here to whine. Fortunately, I am not the only one who thought about this in a more nuanced way. There were a few folks in the thread who I felt had thoughtful reflections around the idea of the GRE, one of which even suggested a more "get to know the student" model that I would prefer. I feel a lot of ambivalence about it. I have read the data that suggests all other forms of evaluation are even more biased socioeconomically and with grade inflation, etc. it's hard to distinguish between students. I advocated we get rid of it in our program (US based) a few years ago because it was hurting our application numbers to keep it and we were struggling to get qualified domestic applicants. I've since moved away from the US and away from a cohort model of recruiting students towards a direct entry model where students contact me to join my lab. They do have their grades/degrees vetted centrally and getting a scholarship is a competitive process. But beyond English language proficiency (ISLETs or TOEFL) there is no standardized test. At an individual level for mentees I don't find the GRE terribly informative. It's a whole separate thing when I accept students who are good fits into my lab rather than think holistically who are the best students to recruit into a program. I do think for PhD research, there is a lot of intangible qualities that are hard to capture empirically and are intrinsically subjective. Sometimes efforts to numericize in the name of equity are riddled with the same problems that ranking researchers with metrics generally. Like I'm sure we can all agree that H-index, citation counts, number of high impact papers, etc. is definitely but imperfectly correlated with how creative/impactful/beneficial a researcher is and what they bring to a community. What can be measured can be gamed. @CBBaileyLab There's also a nice thread about how the subject-specific GRE wasn't easily accessible for one student, which I think highlights some of the real world challenges in the way of getting to grad school: the subject-specific GRE was not offered where i lived, in Ottawa (the capital of Canada), so i had to wake up at 4:00 AM and drive to Montreal on a freezing cold morning to take the test. by the time it started i was so tired i couldn't even focus. wonderful system why not include an obstacle course as a screening device while you're at it also you can get a great score on that test and not be good at research and thinking. and vice versa @snackowska With all that said, let's close out this rant for the day. Because I don't want to incite an academic debate, I'm naturally hiding this behind the paywall. Most folks will never read this, but I had a lot of fun writing it. As always, if you liked this, there's plenty more where that came from: Grade Inflation Is Bullshit Can I Just Rant for a Minute? Grad School Applications Suck We Have to End Our Cultural Obsession With Grades Otherwise, thanks for being patrons! I hope to see you again soon. P.S. I was thinking a little about this after I set it to publish, and I wanted to make it clear that I have taken the GRE. I took it while working in industry. As someone with some real world experience, coming back to take the GRE seemed silly. Certainly, my experience qualifies me for a graduate program, especially in a practical field like computer science. Yet, it's the exam that faculty respect, not the experience. That's interesting to me.