Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Fool's avatar
  2. Santa Monica's avatar
  3. Charles Bakker's avatar
  4. Matty Silverstein's avatar
  5. Jason's avatar
  6. Nathan Meyvis's avatar
  7. Stefan Sciaraffa's avatar

    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Educational Testing Service–a Comment from a Prospective PhD Student

Brian Leiter

A student applying to PhD programs writes:

I am a keen follower of your blog and thought you might like to know a bit about the way ETS is currently treating applying graduate students. ETS now charges $160 each time a student takes the test, and $23 per score report sent to a school. Given the poor economic situation right now, many of us are applying to 15+ schools to give us a good chance of getting in. This means each of us is giving about $415 to ETS (or more, depending on whether one needs to retake the test) in order to get a good shot at a PhD program.  Needless to say, this is quite burdensome for a group of people who are not particularly economically advantaged. I have spent about $2000 on application fees and ETS charges in order to give myself a good chance of getting into a PhD program. My yearly salary is $10,500.

 

All of this would be bad enough, but ETS has one other serious failing: their poor record-keeping means that some students receive a score report with only their most recent GRE score, while others receive their scores for the past five years. Out of my cohort of applying graduate students, only one of us was given his/her scores for the past five years. The rest of us received only the most recent (and higher!) scores. This means that admissions committees will only see my most recent score, giving me a notable (though small) leg-up in applying. While I doubt this would highly influence any admissions committee, ETS is still introducing some bias into the process.

 

Even aside from the questions about using GRE scores as a determinant of student success, ETS is overcharging us and doing a poor job at rendering the services for which we depend on them.

I admit I was in the dark about how high the fees were, but there is not, I fear, much leverage students or schools have with ETS.  Have others had similar problems with ETS services?

Leave a Reply to Just another PhD Applicant Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

50 responses to “Educational Testing Service–a Comment from a Prospective PhD Student”

  1. Derek Bowman

    Schools have one very real piece of leverage over ETS: they can stop using the GRE to evaluate applicants. In addition the costs mentioned above, the tests also unfairly disadvantage those who are not able to afford test prep services for advice on gaming the test. I don't have any expertise here, but this post (written by an academic with extensive experience in the test prep industry) makes a compelling case for dropping the GRE:

    http://www.gotmedieval.com/2010/04/completely-serious-lets-drop-the-gre.html

    Reply
  2. PhD Applicant

    Maybe someone from Cornell can comment, because they don't require it? Of the 12 schools that I applied to, that was the only one. Also, just a note of correction, the initial $160 charge includes sending 4 score reports for free at the time that you take the test. So if you know where you are applying early enough, you can chop off $92 from your GRE costs. But that is really just a drop in the bucket.

    Reply
  3. Tom

    It is worth adding that the GRE can be problematic for applicants from outside the US, who may have a harder time finding tuition, or advice about the test.

    Does anyone know how the ETS goes about deciding what is to be on test? Do they, for example, have any serious research to indicate that whether one understands the word 'pusillanimous' is correlated with one's chances of doing well in grad school?

    Reply
  4. Mark Engleson

    They botched my the spelling of my last name! This would be funny, if departments had still received my scores.

    Reply
  5. Alex Worsnip

    I agree about dropping the GRE. I also hadn't heard about the planned move, noted by the linked article, to combine the verbal and math scores into a single score. Why on earth would the ETS do this? Surely that just reduces the informativeness of an applicant's results? And it seems like there are many PhD fields in which one score is significantly more relevant than the other.

    Reply
  6. Former Applicant

    As a former applicant, I found the most ridiculous part of the fee-structure was the score reporting. Institutions have the choice of paper-based reporting, batch CD-ROM reporting, or internet reporting. Leaving aside what would be an *almost justifiable—though, to be sure, overpriced—charge for paper reporting, it costs $23 to send an electronic file with scores associated with the respective student names on a CD-ROM or to allow schools to view to over the internet. Given that in latter two cases, scores are sent at once in a batch, I can see no way in which that the charge even can exceed $1.

    Reply
  7. Margaret Atherton

    In addition to hearing from Cornell, I would like to hear from members of graduate admissions committees who have found that GRE scores are predictors of graduate school success. (I should say this has not been my experience.) Given the rather staggering financial cost of this kind of test taking, surely admissions committees need a very good reason to require them.

    Reply
  8. Melissa J.

    "their poor record-keeping means that some students receive a score report with only their most recent GRE score, while others receive their scores for the past five years."

    I had this problem with ETS earlier this year with my grad applications. Instead of linking your scores with your SSN or birthday (which you provide them with), ETS has decided the best way to identify scores with the person is by registration address. You have to call ETS to get your scores linked together.

    Reply
  9. Recent Philosophy PhD

    I would like to echo the views of Derek Bowman, with the added point that if one can afford test prep services, one is often literally guaranteed a 100-pt (or more) bump in scores. This fact alone raises serious concerns about what the test is actually measuring. Moreover, if we are actually interested in recruiting students to graduate school in philosophy based on their philosophical potential, and not their financial status, continuing with the current system (which, in many cases I am familiar with, uses some undisclosed GRE score as a cutoff for consideration of applications) is extremely unwise, and probably unjust.

    Reply
  10. Current applicant

    While I wholeheartedly agree that the GRE is both overpriced and not a useful tool for measuring philosophical acumen, I disagree that economically advantaged people are… advantaged… because of test prep courses and the like. ETS claims that this test is much less about gaming than the SAT, and that claim seems correct.

    For example, I scored over 1500 with no preparation and my partner over 1400. I know people who have lots of prep and do not cross 1200. This, however, I suppose is not helpful as we have to examine cases of a single individual. I also know many individuals who have taken the test, not been satisfied with their scores, taken a test prep, then scored 10-20 points better–not a big advantage. As far as I can tell, the only people whom these courses help are those who cannot do independent work. If that is the case, they probably ought not to be philosophers anyway. I understand that my argument is merely anecdotal [as so many arguments on this website seem to be] and not very useful without a large sample size, but perhaps others can share similar or opposing stories.

    As far as knowing what 'pusillanimous' means, it may not help in graduate school but how else do you expect to read Heinlein's Starship Troopers (the work in which I have ever encountered the word).

    Reply
  11. Anon. Grad Student

    I can't vouch for the neutrality of the source, as it's just the result of a quick google search, but some figures are available at http://www.aetr.org/ets.php

    Unfortunately, I'm not sure that pushing to revoke ETS' non-profit status would have any positive outcome for students. The most sensible thing seems to be a centralized application materials database, as this would ease burdens on students, letter-writers, and departmental administrators alike, but then comes the trouble of convincing the administration that the report from the centralized database is sufficiently official. Maybe admission decisions could be made on the basis of such "unofficial" reports, and then only students intending to matriculate would need to pay the highwaymen at ETS.

    The elephant in the room is, of course, that it's absolutely insane that the "correct" way to play the current admissions game is to apply to 15 programs. That's a thornier issue, and maybe one for another day. But it's worth noting that if the norm were something you could more or less count on one hand, the burden of testing fees would be much less onerous.

    Reply
  12. David

    I also didn't know the fees had gotten so high since I took it 15 years ago, although it didn't strike me as cheap even then.

    Combining the section scores strikes me as unwise, given how many disciplines use only one, or give much greater emphasis to one.

    People who haven't taken the test recently may also not know that the analytic section was removed some years ago. That was the one part that I thought wholly applicable to the wide range of disciplines that the GRE serves, as it tested the ability to read carefully, parse arguments, and organize information. For those more familiar with the LSAT, the GRE analytic was about 3/4 Logical Reasoning and about 1/4 Analytical Reasoning.

    Verbal gets at some of that, but it's largely a vocabulary test. Drilling words and stems can help students prepare for it, but the people who do best are people who simply have been reading a lot of varied material for years.

    Math is clearly not applicable to most humanities disciplines, though increasingly so to the social sciences. It also suffers from a severe score distribution problem: since the GRE math is essentially identical to the SAT math (or very similar, in recent years), all of the math, sciences, and engineering students who take it get very high scores, forcing others down the imposed distribution. I've heard that in some years as many as a quarter of the students who take the GRE ace the math section.

    Reply
  13. Former Applicant

    Programs could also accept copies of score reports, which could then be confirmed by the student with a proper score report (after admitting the student). That would remove most of the "score report" costs. I remember the programs that I applied to being okay with that.

    Reply
  14. Eric

    I applied to Ph.D programs in Philosophy this year, and I cannot think of a single reason why the GRE is used by Philosophy programs. On the one hand, as the author notes, it is a serious financial burden on students. But more important, it significantly detracted from the amount of time that I had to work on my writing sample, which is of course a far more important element of the application. Would a department rather have (1) a writing sample that displays my absolute best work, or (2) a writing sample that could have been improved if I had had more time, in addition to GRE scores?

    I imagine that a lot of the pressure comes from the university administrations, since average GRE scores contribute to the (amazingly inane) rankings that US News puts together. But Philosophy programs aren't ranked, so what could the justification then be?

    Reply
  15. Another PhD Applicant

    There are additional costs associated with the GRE that have not yet been considered. ETS claims that the GRE is not a test that can be studied for; it is supposed to be a test of natural intelligence. This is completely false, however. My score improved by about 500 points after I spent a summer studying. This is common knowledge; everyone knows that studying will help enormously. Because of this, applicants must spend money on study materials, which can cost another hundred dollars (or more). Many applicants will even spend about a thousand or more taking GRE classes in the hope of improving their score. I'm not sure how much the courses help, thankfully, because I would not have been able to afford any of them. If they are helpful, however, this offers yet another advantage for those with the means to pay, and a disadvantage for the rest of us.

    Reply
  16. Grad Student

    I've taken both the GRE and the LSAT and it struck me that the LSAT seemed like it would be a much better predictor of philosophical ability.

    The LSAT tests Logical Reasoning, Analytical Reasoning, and Reading Comprehension.

    Why would the GRE's Mathematics, Analogies, Vocabulary, and Reading Comp. be a better predictor for success as a philosopher?

    Reply
  17. Lisa Shapiro

    My understanding was that some institutions internal scholarships are awarded across units on the basis of GRE scores. Or else universities have minimum GRE score requirements for admission to its grad programs. It might be useful to get some actual data on this extrinsic consideration.

    Reply
  18. A prof

    In the absence of non-anecdotal evidence, here's some more anecdotal evidence: I think the sense in my department (a Leiter-ranked PhD-granting department in the US) is that, although a good GPA from a "pedigree" school and good GRE scores are correlated with increased success in obtaining university-wide fellowships, such fellowships are not correlated with increased success in the program.

    On a more serious note, I learned the word 'pusillanimous' from Ministry's 1991 single "Jesus Built My Hotrod." (The single came with two versions of the song, one of which was the "Short, Pusillanimous, So-They-Can-Fit-More-Commercials-On-The-Radio Edit.") I like to think that listening to industrial metal improved my chances of admission to graduate school.

    Reply
  19. Current PhD Applicant

    As an applicant points out above, you may send your GRE scores to 4 schools on the day of your test. However, at that time you will not know your analytic writing score. As such, I did not take advantage of that resource and suspect others feel the same way.

    Tom comments above that the GRE can be problematic for non-US students. I think resources like this blog obviate this problem. As a PhD applicant currently outside the US, I encountered this difficulty. However, I found a discussion a few months back on the GRE that answered most of my questions. Furthermore, a number of department websites advertise their students’ average GRE scores for the last few years. In the end I think the GRE is as much an enigma to US students as it is to non-US students.

    Finally, when I took the GRE the second time ETS did not include my past scores (apparently because my address has changed in the 2 years between tests). This was frustrating because although my verbal section had gone up significantly, the other two sections had actually dropped. Unfortunately, ETS informed me that it would take some time to correct this problem and I needed to get my scores out right away. The result was that I had to choose which score to send for my first round of applications.

    Reply
  20. Jorgen

    I am currently applying to PhD programs, and I ended up paying $505 dollars to the ETS total. The biggest problem I encountered was having to come up with the $23 for each school to which I applied to report the GRE scores. I'm not sure whether or not this information is difficult to find, but while applying to schools, studying for the GRE, etc. I was well aware that I would have to pay the $160 fee to take the test, it was only after I was applying to programs and began sending GRE scores that I learned about the $23 per school fee.

    Reply
  21. David

    I taught for a nationally well known test prep company while in graduate school many years ago (SAT, GRE, and LSAT). It struck me as strange that the company insisted on hiring people who scored in the 95th percentile on the test. Such people, in my experience, largely aren't using the techniques the company teaches. On the verbal, they just know the vocabulary. Etc. To be fair, I suppose there's a better chance that high scorers will be able to see the correct solution to a new problem and translate it into the company's system. But I suspect it's largely a marketing consideration.

    I came to the conclusion that the company could help people (1) who had high levels of anxiety about testing or (2) who had no experience with certain types of questions (this was especially true of the GRE Analytic and the LSAT, where the logic games questions are very trainable). It's also the case that the company's techniques (and those of its competitors) are pitched at clients who are largely naturally scoring below 500. They're unlikely to help people who are at a 650 get an 800.

    In any event, the previous posters who say that the results are inconsistent are right. The company's guarantee back then (late 90s) had to do with improvement from a client's score on their own pre-test ("Come and take a free GRE and hear about our test prep offerings!") to the official test, not from an already established official score to a second score. They don't say this (even internally), but a lot of the improvement naturally comes from familiarity with the test as much as anything. The "benefit" of the guarantee was simply the ability to take the class again for free (which cost is built into the high tuition for the first session, of course).

    I often recommend to my undergraduates today that the best ways to prep for these tests is just to do their reading and homework in their "verbal" classes, read somewhat challenging material for leisure, not to neglect quantitative classes entirely, and to play with those logic games magazines you can buy for a couple bucks at the newstand. The LSAT (and former GRE Analytic) puzzles aren't completely solvable like those in the magazines, but the basic principles are largely the same and facility with the magazine problems will help on the test. In fact, the hardest puzzles in the magazines are significantly harder than those on the tests. Once they get closer to the tests, they ought to work with real practice tests, of course.

    Reply
  22. Michael

    I would honestly like to hear the reasons why philosophy programs don't scrap the GRE for the much more relevant LSAT.

    Not only is the LSAC much more helpful than the ETS, but the test is significantly more indicative of philosophical aptitude. On the GRE I am being tested on high school level math and college level vocabulary. With the LSAT, however, I was tested on logical reasoning and reading comprehension. While these may not be the only skills necessary to succeed in a philosophy PHD program, they are at least markedly more pertinent than the current system.

    However, as somebody who entered college with an eight grade education – and thus no high school math – I may be biased!

    Reply
  23. Eli

    The same kind of economic frustrations follow from the absurd transcript requirements of many programs. I think the University of Michigan is a good example of a sensible policy, where you upload a transcript, official or unofficial, and they will want hard copies of official transcripts only if you are accepted. Why not a similar policy for the GRE, where the applicant can upload a scanned copy of their score report? Is there really some huge danger that people will produce counterfeit GRE score reports? The cost of applying, which is already high in virtue of the application fees, is driven to ridiculous heights by all of this insistence on "official" documents and hard copies.

    Reply
  24. current grad student

    My wife had similar problems with ETS when applying to graduate school: significantly improved score on the second try with no intervening work except lots of time familiarizing herself with the often convoluted thought patterns behind the verbal questions, also massive amounts of time on the phone and money wasted trying to convince them that she was the same person despite a name and address change when we married.

    Reply
  25. PerfectVerbal

    I increased my combined GRE score from the 1100's to the 1400's simply through the rote memorization of abstruse vocabulary that, if used in my philosophical papers, would make my writing come across as stilted and arcane. Despite my labors invested in this inane albeit necessary task, many schools will simply "average" my two sets of scores, as though my recent demonstrated abilities as a 99th percentile Verbal reasoner are somehow tempered by a four year old poor performance. Five years is way too long for scores to come off your record – its a career obstructing policy for those who need to retake. As such, I think this practice is unfair, and should be retired – especially if it isn't being uniformly followed as the OP suggests. As it stands, I suppose I'll just cross my fingers and hope I'm one of the lucky ones that have only my recent and better scores on my ETS report?? Give me a break…

    Furthermore, there should be much more transparency across the board with respect to the importance of GRE scores. So many departments downplay their significance, but I'd be interested to know how many AdCom members immediately flag an application over a not-so-stellar GRE score.

    Reply
  26. another PhD applicant

    It should be added that ETS is a registered non-profit (read, tax exempt) organization. So where does all that revenue go? If the links below are any indication, the answer is to seriously bloated executive salaries and a bit of government lobbying. Just to complete the picture of (non-profit?) corporate largess, the president lives rent-free on a old mansion on the grounds of the company's headquarters.

    http://www.aetr.org/ets.php

    http://www.fairtest.org/no-pay-performance-testing-companies

    http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30915FB3B5E0C738FDDA00894DF494D81&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fOrganizations%2fE%2fEducational%20Testing%20Service

    Reply
  27. David Holmberg

    No one has mentioned the problems with the “analytical” writing section.

    To write high-scoring essays I had to make a concerted effort to unlearn the philosophical reflexes that I had acquired as an undergraduate. Making important qualifications and carefully interpreting the claim advanced in the prompt might not ruin your score; however, devoting as much time to those activities as they usually require puts you at risk of not being able to write a sufficiently long essay (length is necessary for a high score). So it’s a lot safer to go for a salvo of examples and detail (names, dates, places, etc.) in support of a brute claim that might even misconstrue the prompt. A perfect example is furnished by ETS itself in its 2007-present prep manual for the test (pg. 406, Test 2: Issue Topic 1), in which it gives a six, its highest score, to just such an essay.

    A high score on the analytical writing section might indicate potential as a political speech writer, but I’m skeptical about it’s usefulness in assessing a student’s abilities in philosophical or even general scholarly composition.

    Reply
  28. Former Applicant and Continuing GRE Hater

    One poster suggested that schools could ask for just a copy of scores for the admissions review process. And upon acceptance, the student could mail in an official score report. That way the grad college gets what it wants (rankings relevant info, as another poster pointed out), the admissions committee gets what it wants (a vague impression of aptitude, I guess), and the applicants are *less* poor.

    Princeton has adopted this practice, and I think it's working really well. I think the only way to improve upon this approach is to abolish use of the GRE all together. Barring utopia, why not embrace the second best?

    Reply
  29. current graduate student

    Departments also don't know the conditions under which someone takes the test. My own case nicely (and now humorously) illustrates the point. The first time I took the GRE, I found out the night before that the only employed philosopher at my institution was being unjustly fired. I bombed it. On my second attempt a couple months later, I couldn't find the test center. It wasn't at the address on my registration card. After I gave up and was driving out of the parking lot, I saw "Thomson-Prometric" on the side of a semi-truck with a bunch of wires coming out of it. I almost gave up on life right then. Yes, I took the GRE the second time in the back of a truck. Worse still, the truck wasn't properly heated even though it was winter in Indiana. Also, the one bathroom was at the front of the truck, and the bathroom door nearly hit the nearest test-takers. (The door didn't hit them, but you can guess what did.)
    I bombed that attempt, too.

    I bombed the test twice, even though I nearly aced the SAT without studying, and taught the LAST, ACT, and SAT for a well-known test prep company. I nearly aced the GRE on a stress-free third attempt, but I'm still a little resentful that departments saw those first two scores and might have used them to make decisions.

    Reply
  30. Kathryn J Norlock

    Michael's comment reminds me how redundant I found it to take the GRE after exelling on the LSAT. The GRE seemed, back then, a very similar test to the LSAT, with an appended math section that I suspect my admitting school did not regard as critical to their decision anyway.

    I cannot resist raising a wee point in favor of some sort of test, which is that if graduate schools to which I applied at the age of 24 had gone largely on my undergraduate GPA, then they would have relied on my terrible record as a 17-year-old in her first year of university for quantitative information as to my aptitude. I felt very strongly that my conduct as a teenager was certainly not indicative of my aptitude! Therefore, consider we young fools who grew into a later life as able philosophers, when you imagine admissions on the basis of possibly very old GPA information.

    Reply
  31. Philipp Schwind

    One problem with the verbal section of the GRE is that it discriminates against non-native speakers of English. Your score in the verbal question depends largely on the amount of vocabulary you have acquired over the years, although it is supposed to test for reasoning ability. Obviously, non-native speakers are at a huge disadvantage here, and even if they study hard, it is almost impossible to close the gap to a well-read native speaker of English. This difference can easily amount to 100 points, and it might be these points that keep you out of a program.

    A question: do admission committees have a policy of taking into account whether a speaker has acquainted English as a first or second language?

    Reply
  32. Becko Copenhaver

    I took the GRE a long time ago. I did rather poorly, with the exception of the verbal component. Perhaps I am biased but I don't think that the test is indicative except in the broadest possible sense. I have the impression that most philosophers agree. So, I have two specific questions:

    1) Do philosophy departments who receive these scores actually take them into account at all?

    2) Do philosophy departments have the ability to determine whether the GRE is required for application?

    If most philosophy departments simply discount the GRE, then it is even more disappointing that applicants are shelling out so much money to the ETS.

    I ask the second question because much of the application process is often handled through the graduate division rather than an individual department – so many departments may be sympathetic but merely hamstrung by the typical university bureaucracy.

    Reply
  33. G. Owen Schaefer

    To those suggesting more schools scrap the GRE as a part of admissions – it's not clear how that would solve a number of the worries brought up. Consider that, with GREs gone, other similarly problematic metrics would replace it in importance, at least at the early stage of the process: grades (subject to variation in schools' grading policies and relative competitiveness), school reputation (bias towards those who can afford elite institutions/game undergrad admissions better), letters of rec (notoriously hard to analyze, may inordinately reflect ability to schmooze), statement of purpose (reflects ability to craft mission statements and trite summaries, not philosophical ability). The writing sample is the only really good metric – but admissions committees don't have the time to read all the samples, especially these days with everyone applying to 15 programs.

    I can see that the GRE's cost may make it seem like the most tempting metric to remove from consideration – but consider, it's nothing compared to the cost differential between elite and some less prestigious institutions. In addition, the solution of unofficial GREs can alleviate the cost without scrapping what is, at least relative to the other non-writing-sample metrics, of some use and relevance.

    Reply
  34. Recent GRE taker

    One thing I noticed about the GRE writing section that seems just utterly and demonstrably unfair is how it rewards those who type quickly and punishes those who don't. We know that length correlates positively with score on the writing section. And someone who can type quickly is obviously going to be at an advantage here, both in drafting the essay and in having as much time as possible to go back and edit it. Editing is especially important given that you should edit the essay with ETS's arbitrary scoring system in mind.

    Reply
  35. Edward D.

    I have never posted here before, but I just want to remark that it would be awful if philosophy programs started using the LSAT (as one poster suggested). Having just finished with the LSAT (and having spoken with many others who have just finished with it), I really know of no reason that any program should use it. It is not a successful aptitude test in any sense–I improved my own score more than 10 points (out of a total range of 60) through self-study, and it is not uncommon for people to raise their scores by 20 points or more using similar means. Essentially, it is an enormous waste of time for applicants who are not gifted test-takers, and escalating standards will only make it a bigger waste of time in years to come.

    One portion of the LSAT–the Logical Reasoning section–might be slightly useful for philosophy programs. The LR section is basically designed to test the ability to distinguish between sound and unsound arguments. But this section makes up only half of the test, while the rest of it is essentially a test of speed.

    I really don't know why law schools use the thing, and I look forward to the day when no one uses it at all. I understand, as Kathryn Norlock noted, that some means other than GPA might be used to adjudicate among applicants. But isn't that the purpose of recommendations and writing samples? I don't understand why there should be an additional consideration beyond these seemingly adequate tools.

    Reply
  36. Rich Booher

    In general, I think that the problems raised about the GRE are sound. However, I think that the worries that the verbal section 'merely tests vocabulary' are utterly odd. Having a strong vocabulary is very important, and is a suitable and appropriate object of evaluation in a potential academic. Not having knowledge of the words tested is evidence that the applicant may struggle reading and comprehending sophisticated texts. Anyone with a PhD in philosophy ought to be able to read thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke, but that cannot be done without a rich vocabulary.

    It may, to some degree, disadvantage some non-native English speakers, but I would like to see real evidence about the degree to which this is so. I know many well-educated persons whose first language is not English yet have a vocabulary that is vastly superior to many native English speakers. I believe that it is from a category of people such as this that the pool of eligible applicants is drawn. Even extremely intelligent people who do not have advanced knowledge of the English language should probably not pursue their graduate studies in the US or the UK.

    Reply
  37. PhD Applicant

    @G. Owen Schaefer:
    Your argument about cost of elite colleges is overstated. In-state tuition at the University of Maryland, which I turned down, was over $22k. At the Ivy League school that I currently attend, the cost is around $50k, but I get $30k in need-based grants because my family is not obscenely wealthy, the only financial category that can afford the sticker-price on private colleges/universities. We all know that there is less social climbing in elite universities than one would hope, but it's still a crime that ETS forces someone like me who is going to school, working on my applications and holding a part-time job that barely pays for my food to shell out hundreds of dollars for something that is completely pointless. Every metric should be taken with a grain of salt–that's why you need more than one. Hopefully recs can show whether a statement of purpose is totally honest, grades whether recs are honest, etc. But that does not mean that a metric that 1) can be easily gamed by rote memorization and tricks and 2) does not represent any philosophically interesting skills should be an application requirement.

    Full disclosure: I got in the 96th and 97th percentiles on the math and verbal sections, respectively.

    Reply
  38. peter kirwan

    my own experience with ETS 5 years ago involved me flying to Dublin (from Edinburgh) to take the test and them changing the venue literally a day beforehand and not telling me. I'm wandering around UCD in a panic for a long time before i find out that's what's happened. Had to fly back to Edinburgh and fly out again to Dublin … again as a result. They refunded me for the first exam but still … pretty shoddy.

    Reply
  39. Becko Copenhaver

    Rich: I agree that those applying to graduate school ought to be well educated, and that vocabulary is a good indication of a good education. However, many if not most students are not well educated. I say this as a teacher at a good undergraduate liberal arts institution with no graduate students. Many of the students I teach are exceptionally bright, hard-working, enthusiastic and want nothing more than to be well educated. And, they love philosophy.

    But the system has failed them. It takes a lot of catching up, and we do a great job at it, together as professors and students. But being here in the trenches, as it were, has taught me a lot about what is and isn't fair to expect from a generation that has been denied an education worthy of their reasonable expectations.

    More practically, we ask our undergraduates who have the desire to go to graduate school to declare, and declare early and to spend almost all of their time on philosophy. We don't like it, but it is the only way that they can compete.

    As a matter of fact – and this was true when I was an undergrad way back when – focusing on philosophy hurts an applicant significantly on the verbal component on the GRE. Philosophy has a vocabulary that is not shared among the rest of the humanities. If you spend three years reading philosophy and not reading in the rest of the humanities you can be assured that your GRE verbal will be at least as good as but probably less than your SAT verbal.

    Should students be reading in the rest of the humanities, along with doing science and being quantitatively literate? You bet. But that dream is long gone, for even the best students. My students, great students, have been cheated of the ideal that we agree ought to be the case.

    Reply
  40. applicant

    I am wondering if there are any good arguments for sustaining the status quo (having applicants pay $23 for GRE scores per school) over the alternative of only requiring copies of official scores for applications with the caveat that the finalization of admission requires official score reports.

    Reply
  41. Just another PhD Applicant

    The GRE score reports are ludicrously expensive for people who just want to send electronic data from one location to another. I can't imagine how much unnecessary corporate overhead, or executive bonuses, is funded by the test fees. (And Americans talk about "big government"?) And all for what? Whether or not vocabulary is important, cramming for the GRE won't build a lasting repertoire, and sometimes less is more anyway. Furthermore, there are a number of problems with the reading comprehension sections on the GRE verbal, including the fact that the test does not require the analysis of arguments or, probably more important in contemporary philosophy, the synthesis of kinds of knowledge.

    Of course, having taken both by now, I can say that the LSAT does require logical analysis to a greater extent, but it's equally teachable. For instance, I have friends who improved their GRE cumulative by well over 150 points through intensive studying; the same goes for a 10-15 point increase on the LSAT. I can say that I experienced that large of a jump on the LSAT between the first two practice exams I took, which has silly implications for those who don't have time or money to prep. (Yale Law has made an attempt to remedy this problem by requiring students to note on applications whether they've actually taken a test-prep course. That seems to depend, though, on how trustworthy the applicants are.)

    It seems to me that neither test really measures "aptitude" for graduate work in any way that avoids introducing a significant economic/prep distortion that would just generally best be left out of the decision. So is there some import to the GRE? Perhaps you might make an argument that doing well on the GRE reflects one's dedication to the idea of graduate school, as indicated by the amount of prep time you've put in. But for any evaluation of that kind to take place, graduate schools would have to take the time to evaluate each student's preparation for the GRE, as well as their performance. I'm sure that would be welcomed. Writing samples seem to be the best indicator. Of course, it would be easy to say that if some students would just stop applying, committees would have more time for the samples. But that's structurally unlikely: we've created a society that rewards hopeful or ambitious young people by acceptance into prestigious institutions on the basis of numerical credentials that putatively correlate with something like their innate ability. Sic transit gloria mundi.

    Reply
  42. Julia

    I'd like to point out that international students have to throw money at ETS not once, but twice, because we have to take the TOEFL as well as the GRE. Here are my two cents on the GRE as a non-native speaker of English (with a perfect score on the TOEFL):
    – The verbal section puts non-native speakers at a disadvantage. The reading comprehension part was pretty easy, but the parts that test mere knowledge of vocabulary are difficult. I spent lots of time memorizing obscure words that I have never encountered before or after the test. I got a decent score (640), but I felt like I was being punished for not spending more time on memorization.
    However, if the entire verbal section had been reading comprehension, I wouldn't have any complaints.
    – Interestingly, the math section also puts non-native speakers at a disadvantage, at least to some extent. Your math skills are pretty intimately tied to the language in which you acquire them, and doing math in a foreign language is awkward and slow, at least at first. Again, I got a decent score (740), but I think if I had taken the test in my native language, an 800 would have been possible.
    – The essay section seems fine, but I was unfortunately too stupid to realize that ETS has their very own ideas about what a decent essay looks like. I wrote a pretty analytic essay about the topic, analyzing the structure of the problem they were posing. That got me no more than a 4.5, but I should have just spent more time figuring out what they want.

    However, I think that it is possible to get a good score on the GRE as a non-native speaker, even though the exam could be improved. Maybe it would be possible for departments to waive the TOEFL for people with a high enough GRE. Compared to the GRE, the TOEFL is a joke, so if someone scores well on the verbal and essay parts of the former, there's no way they wouldn't also ace the latter.

    Reply
  43. R. Clarke

    A couple of folks have repeated that the new GRE will combine results on verbal and math sections into a single score. As far as I can tell, this is misinformation. The ETS website says otherwise, and the information I've received from the graduate school at my institution is otherwise.

    A number of people have expressed intuitions about whether GRE scores are good predictors of performance in graduate philosophy programs, whether the old Analytic section was best, or whether the LSAT would be better. I'm inclined to think that intuitions are poor guides on these questions. What would be good evidence are validity studies with large samples showing the extent to which GRE scores correlate with performance in graduate programs (as measured by, for example, GPA or faculty ranking). From what I could find via google, there seem to have been very few studies of this sort. I found none on philosophy programs in particular.

    At my own institution, it isn't a department option to require or not require the GRE. The graduate school requires it. I suspect the situation is the same at many institutions.

    Reply
  44. Michael

    Two things.

    First, I would like to agree with Becko. The LSAT is a test designed more to test general intelligence (or logical aptitude) whereas the GRE is testing your knowledge of a particular skill set as well as your educational background. While I may not be particularly bright, the GRE exposes the fact that I have been failed by the system. Before college, I had an eight grade education. My parents pulled me out of school halfway through my eight grade year – ostensibly to continue my schooling at home. However, this never happened. I was given a motley collection of flashcard and bargain bin texts for my first semester, but was left to teach myself entirely. After this, the charade was entirely abandoned and I was given a few Star Wars books and mid-level classics and told that reading was the only thing that really mattered. I sat in my room, occasionally reading, for the next five years. After getting my GED and taking the ACT, I enrolled in a community college, but I avoided any classes that built too heavily on high school prerequisites – material that I never received.

    Second, it has been my experience that the GRE is significantly more teachable than the LSAT. Sadly, I have nothing more than personal experience and hearsay to support this position, but hopefully it will be at least mildly illuminating. I took the LSAT before taking the GRE. I did this out of fear. Because of the reasons given above, the idea of basing my hopes of graduate school on the GRE was unnerving. I took the LSAT cold; I didn't know anything about the test, and didn't know that you could use your textbook as scrap paper during the logic games section. I got a 168, i.e., scored in the 96th percentile. This test was one proctored by Kaplan, and I was afterwards offered a position teaching the LSAT. I decided to study for the test and take it again, hoping for a score in the 170's, but despite a month of hard studying, my score never really increased. Furthermore, from having gone through training to teach the class, I was told that they aim to raise students scores as much as five points. A significant amount, but not overwhelming.

    I finally decided to keep fighting for the opportunity to do what I love, and I started studying for the GRE. I took a cold practice test, and was in the 93rd percentile in verbal, but only the 18th percentile in the math section. I knew that the reason for my failure was a complete lack of a background in high school math, so I stuck to it and studied (while working full-time) as much as I could for about a month. I raised my scores to a being in the 99th percentile in verbal and the 67th percentile in math. While this still isn't great, and still may prevent me from achieving my dream, it is still a marked improvement, and shows just how much progress somebody can make on the GRE without any teaching or instruction.

    Reply
  45. a mere applicant

    Thanks for this great post! I find it utterly horrible that some applicants may be disadvantaged merely as a consequence of their economic circumstances.

    My guess is that many people would like to see their department adopt a policy like Princeton's, but have their hands tied, and that others see disadvantages to accepting photocopies of scores that are not evident to me, a mere applicant. But I hope that departments get the message that many of us find the status quo very troublesome.

    Reply
  46. Chuck Cross

    Leaving aside whether the GRE General Test is fair, a good predictor, easily gamed, overpriced, etc., I had the following reaction to the original post: it is just crazy to apply to 15+ graduate programs in philosophy. Anyway….

    No one has suggested bringing back the GRE Philosophy Advanced Test.

    The what?

    That's right: a multiple-choice test just on philosophy and offered (for many years, I take it) as an optional component of the GRE. I took it in 1978 or 1979. Soon thereafter it was no longer offered because few or no graduate programs required it for admission. I don't remember too much about it, but I do remember feeling at home taking it.

    Reply
  47. Applying graduate student

    15+ applications is entirely ordinary now. I submitted 19. All of the graduate students at my institution are applying to at least 15 (with one exception – he does continental!). The reality is that unless you have the pedigree, even with a great GRE score, etc. etc., you have to apply to that many to stand a chance at getting in. Many programs receive 300+ applications and only accept five or so students. That's a 1/60 chance (which can of course be improved with a good application). Sadly, the system is really sort of a lottery – and everyone knows that if you buy more tickets, you have a better chance of winning.

    Another quick note: the rationale behind so many applications is that even though it costs a lot, the payoff is really huge. Five years to study what you love – and paid for! It shouldn't be a surprise that the number has crept up over the years.

    Reply
  48. 500 dollar poorer applicant

    The case for GREs being inaccurate indicators of high-quality students seems very strong. But, since schools receive hundreds of applications, I imagine the GRE is used in combination with grades to quickly dismiss a large portion of severely under-qualified applicants. I agree that the difference in philosophical potential between someone with a 1400 versus someone with a 1600 is debatable, but I imagine there are a number of applicants that can't break a 1200 and have a B average in philosophy classes. That is, it doesn't seem to help in choosing between the best, but it might help in eliminating the worst.

    Hopefully, that's how the GRE is used. Anyone worthy of admission to top programs-regardless of whether English is their second language, or how stressed they were, or how little they studied, or how long it's been since they took math-can break a bottom limit of, let's say, 1200.

    That said, I'm 500 bucks poorer than I could be. And under-qualified applicants are obvious in many other ways. In any case, if under-qualified applicants really are eliminated in this manner, then making this explicit on the application website is the best way to reduce the quantity of bad applications (e.g., "Send GRE scores. Note that extremely few students with scores lower than 1200 are ever admitted. However, after this minimum, higher scores are significantly less important than good writing samples.") (note: several program websites do say something like this.)

    But maybe I'm wrong. If GREs are not used to eliminate under-qualified applicants, and GREs are also bad indicators of highly-qualified applicants, then what reason could there be for keeping this costly metric around? Is it because, in practice, GREs are used as an interdepartmental measure to justify funding for grad students of particular programs? In that case, blame would no longer be on the individual admissions committees, but it makes it no more defensible. (GRE scores used in this way does, however, advantage philosophy grad applicants who tend to be better test takers than other grad applicants.)

    Reply
  49. Christy Mag Uidhir

    I'm with Chuck. Not only does applying to 15+ programs seem rather loopy, but given that grad school application fees can run as high as $100, the bulk of the financial burden for prospective PhD students obviously comes from application fees. As such, perhaps the Prospective PhD student ought to rethink his/her application strategy rather than bellyache about comparatively minor ETS costs that could be effectively defrayed simply by applying to fewer programs (e.g., ETS costs for applying to 10 programs: < $300, savings in application fees (@ a conservative $60 an application): at least $300).

    Reply
  50. Michael Cholbi

    I agree with nearly all the critical comments about the GRE made here. But as someone who teaches at a less elite university, I'd like to register support for *some* way of comparing applicants that doesn't depend on context or background. Grades are subject to many institutional variables, as is strength or diversity of curriculum. (So applicants should take core history of philosophy and analytic courses? But what if they're not offered at your institution, or offered very infrequently?) Writing samples seem context-independent, but surely a student's sample improves if the student can do an independent study or take a senior thesis course wherein there's plenty of faculty feedback. But again, that's not available to all students. I do not generally encourage students to go to grad school, but those who have applied have been helped because the GRE makes an apples-to-apples comparison possible, a comparison that typically makes their applications look more attractive relative to those from universities with better reputations or more resources.

    That said, whether the GRE as presently constituted is the best instrument to provide context-independent evidence of student ability, I simply don't know.

    A last thought: Could ETS employ means testing for these exams and the costs associated with them — charging less for students with lower incomes, etc. (as the APA does for annual dues)?

    Reply

Designed with WordPress