Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Real-World Experience in a closed environment
The GRE has been overhauled, apparently, to make it more relevant to the material covered in grad school.
First, let me summarize my opinion: STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID!!!
In detail:
The point of these tests is to give graduate admissions dudes more information concerning applicants.
The information that comes from these tests depends on the structure of the test.
If the structure of a test does not change, admissions dudes can use past performance by folks who they've seen actually do work in grad school to evaluate how useful the information from the test is.
If the test changes, the information portrayed by the test changes, and admissions dudes have to start from scratch in determining how useful that information is.
So, even ignoring the question of whether the changes give more useful information, changing tests is not something to be done callously. It seems like it'd be far better to give the 'new' test a new name, too, and let the colleges themselves decide whether they want to use the new test or the old one.
This is why the efforts to change the SAT were so stupid. The problem (if it existed) was not that the SAT wasn't properly representing students, it was that admissions thought the SAT was providing information that it didn't actually provide. As long as admissions folks recognize the value of the SAT, there's no problem, and changing the SAT served only to remove a huge chunk of information that could have been provided to admissions dudes.
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