“Increasing diversity by ditching the GRE”

“There are two possible reasons for this offset: either men and women are fundamentally different in their physics abilities, or GRE scores are not testing what we think they’re testing. There are many reasons to favor the former over the latter. First, the male/female divide does not persist from applicants all countries. For example, the gap does not persist for Chinese and Indian applicants, nor does it show up in applications from most Eastern European countries. Indeed, women from China and India score significantly and consistently higher than US women on the Physics GRE…Another reason is that there are no scientific studies to back the assertion of male/female cognitive differences, and certainly none to explain the observed differences in GRE scores. This is assuming that GRE scores are indicative of the cognitive abilities that matter for success in graduate school, which is highly debatable, as explained in the Nature article cited above, and in other studies…We at Harvard have downgraded the importance of GRE test scores in our admissions process and the quality and diversity of our admitted students has increased as a result.”

http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2014/06/increasing-diversity-by-ditching-gre.html

It’s weird because we all know that standardized tests are testing SO MANY MORE THINGS than base ‘intelligence’ or ‘capacity for success’ or whatever poorly-defined concept that basically means ‘similarity to our raced/gendered/classed image of what a genius is’. They are testing such things as: the level of test-taking anxiety; how much time and money was spent preparing for the test; how similar the culture of the test-taker is to the test-writer; stereotype threat (GREAT measurement system for stereotype threat); if your first language is English; and most of all, ability to care about lots of super random and useless stuff. (fun fact: biggest predictive factor for scores on the GRE writing portion: not the complexity of the concepts or the vocabulary, but the length of the essay.) Everything is a flawed proxy for some other quantity the test is trying to measure.

And I also sometimes wonder about the impact that my test scores have on the world – when a person associates them with me, does it cause them to adjust their expectations of Black women, or does it cause them to see me as less Black and less female?

I don’t know if I have a solution but I think it would be an interesting project to actually look at what factors are the biggest predictors of success (besides like class and race and gender) like “GRIT” and finding ways to measure that in order to inform admissions committees. Or maybe what Harvard is doing, considering GRE scores as a piece of information but not weighting them very highly and considering them in the context of their deep flaws.

(Credit to AA I think?)