I wrote the GRE a few weeks back. It's a bullshit exam that really says nothing about how you will do in grad schools. Many schools just don't even count it. Other schools use it for first cuts and other use it to decide funding. Talk about bullshit.

In Canada, schools don't require the GRE. I am applying to one American PhD program, and as such, had to take the GRE. The program people basically told me not to fail.

So why isn't anyone doing anything about this test?

I truly feel sorry for Americans who have to do this test. It is complete nonsense - an entire industry based on a fake measure of intelligence and future ability as a graduate student.

I wish students would just start failing the exam on purpose or at least stage some kind of large scale protest.

The ETS courses are expensive -- I heard around $1000. I wonder why there hasn't been a huge protest by graduate departments about these kinds of things.

BLAH!

Oh, and the verbal section is harder than any of the pretests I took. I've heard many people say that, so if I were you, I would focus some of your last efforts on that aspect of the test.

The first part which you label as "racist" isn't the most accurate; I believe the term you want is "classist". Being able to have access to things due to a wealthy background, or lack of access, isn't necessarily based on race, but it is related to the social class\income of your family.

But yes, standardized testing sucks for many reasons. Great post!

The availability of preparation classes, having the funds to afford a class, the time to take a class, etc. are also a way in which standardized testing is classist. I find standardized tests to be more classist than anything else, although classism ties into racism sometimes to a point where it can be hard to take the two separately. I was lucky enough to have free SAT prep classes offered after school when I was in high school, even though the teacher wasn't the best. Was also given hand me down prep books that my friend's older brother used when he took the SAT. This is not the case for many people who graduate high school (or are in college getting ready to take the GRE) and alot of that has to do with class and the schools you go to (some schools don't have the resources to fund prep classes either).

Either way, because prep classes (and prep books which are often more expensive than the classes themselves) are so vital to achieving a high score on those tests (as you mentioned yourself, though sometimes it is less learning the material and more learning test taking strategies it still requires being taught to you somehow) it is an EXTREME disadvantage to anyone who is unable to do any preparation. So I think standardized tests are geared much more towards the upper class, with emphasis on opera music and sailing and other such upper class activities and a bigger advantage going to those people who have the resources to put into preparation for those tests. So it's a nice triple whammy there, sexism, racism, AND classism. Woot. -_-

OMG. I must say what a CROCK the tests from ETS are. GRE aside, let me tell you about the Praxis II Language Exam. I took the French Content Knowledge exam and there was a section that had non-native French speakers speaking French. Test takers (I in this case) needed to identify the mistakes the non-native speakers were making. Well! The, how do I say it, illegitimacy of the exam was the mere fact that the non-native speakers were speaking faster than the native speakers! From my own experience of surrounding myself with US students taking French (with levels ranging from middle school to even college level), there is no way in hell, heaven, or anywhere else, that those non-native French speakers would be speaking faster than native French speakers.

I thought I was alone until the test administrator, as well as a fellow classmate, had told me the same thing happened with the Spanish version. So, it wasn't just the French content exam.

My point is that standardized tests are a waste of money (but money-making for testing companies) but, unfortunately, one must take these ridiculous exams to receive certification in various fields.

Excellent points about the sexism/racism in standardized testing, by the way.

I hear you on the GRE. Not so much on the subject area part, I figure that's fair enough, but I never really did understand why, as someone applying to graduate programs in History, why math should be equally weighted with reading and writing ability.

One really good example of how racial inequality (and I would argue class inequality as well) plays a role: IQ tests have been known to do "what's wrong with this picture" questions involving, for example, a rooster laying on an egg or a diver whose air bubbles are going down not up. Given that the IQ test is evaluating young children, you really have to wonder how many city kids are going to have spent time at a farm or diving in the ocean?

I am an SAT tutor, and let me tell you, there is no way for the average student to do very well to extremely well on that sucker other than by taking a test prep score. There's no away around it. The SAT tests nothing but the ability to get around the built-in tricks and traps that are used every year. All I do in addition to alerting students to those tricks and traps is teach them the formula for how to write and deliver the perfect essay. Additionally, practice is essential in order to get a good score. It's pretty disgusting on the whole. Not only are students with wealth given further advantage by being able to take SAT courses, many of us tutors are undercompensated. I am lucky to have worked for good companies in my stint, but I see ads for tutoring jobs that make me shake my head. $11 an hour, when those companies are, in essence, minting money off a guide they have to revise only occasionally and then in sections?!

Granted, there are some companies out there that are trying to bridge the gap by offering sliding-scale or free SAT tutoring for lower-income students, as well as by paying their tutors more than other companies to keep them motivated to teach well, and their efforts should be recognized and subsidized. Regardless of their efforts, though, the rich kids will still be able to afford more and better tutoring for the SAT than their lower-income peers.

The GRE verbal section uses completely outdated words. I couldn't understand why they would pick under-used and obscure words but I have sense realized that many of these words are found in great classics such as War and Peace and Moby Dick. This actually makes sense because the GRE isn't supposed to favor any particular focus such as English majors and everyone has heard of and has access to classic literature (if they can access a library). I wish I had realized this sooner however as my high school English classes were theatre based and I didn't start reading classics until the last year or so. (redundant lab work allows me to consume many audio books)

Isn't the world of classical music/opera pretty classist too? As much as there have been people like Leonard Bernstein who tried to promote it to a less privileged audience, the fact remains that most people who can afford music lessons as children - which tends to be the most common way to get into classical music - are at least upper-middle-class. Simply going to the opera or symphony is expensive enough (and plus it usually requires one to dress up) that it's seen as a sign of privilege - doubly-so for taking music lessons, triply-so for attending a music conservatory or boarding school.

And classical music knowledge is also one that reinforces racism (since classical music is a traditionally European tradition, and those composers who have been minorities are generally shoved to the sidelines) and sexism (very few female composers compared to the numerous male composers, and almost zero whom the general public would know by name).

I say this as an avid classical music lover, and as a classical music composition major, but it really bothers me that they're expecting us to know it for standardized tests just as it expects one to know sailing terminology. It just seems more likely to push out those students who are most at a disadvantage, since another example of the privilege associated with classical music is the fact that so very few schools have good music programs, and those that do are disproportionately going to be in middle- and upper-class areas where parents can afford to buy their kids state-of-the-art instruments and private lessons, and to throw money at the Band Boosters.

First off, just to be a little nit-picky, I would say the issue that you cite is classism, not racism.

Also, while this does not help the SAT/GRE world, in my profession (speech-language pathology, which I am in grad school for) we do have to keep this in mind. When we use a standardized test on someone we need to make sure it was normed on the population they are coming from, otherwise we can only use the scores as a guide but not the normative data they provide. We also rely on more than just standardized testing, which I think is really important.

I definitely agree that there are lots of problems with standardized tests but at the same time it would be almost impossible to make a test that would be fair to all cultures. Personally, I would rather see standardized tests like the SAT/GRE just go away completely and college admission be more based on how students have actually performed.

Good luck on the GRE, I hated prepping for that. I could not afford a prep class and had to rely on books to prepare. I achieved the score I needed though and I hope you are able to do the same!

While I agree that it's sexist to not have a mixture of "he" and "she" on the test and practice quizzes, I think the take on the racist nature of the test is off in that it seems as if (to me) critics are assuming that only rich (and almost entirely white) people are interested in/know about things like opera and sailing. This is racist, classist and frustrating, especially when I think of how far women like Marian Anderson had to travel to get respect in the classical music industry.

That said, if we COULD get some GRE/SAT questions about bell hooks and Riot Grrrl herstory, I'd be pretty f-in happy.

First of all, best of luck with the GRE! I hope you'll come to find that it's really not as bad as the prep books make them out to be, as I found out when I took it.

That being said, I wanted to offer some thoughts on this post.

First, when researching information about the predictive (or non-predictive) nature of tests in general, may I recommend consulting articles by school psychologists, industrial-organizational psychologists or, especially, psychometricians? You'll find more complete and thorough data that way.

That being said, I have a real issue with a point made on the gender gap article. The article cites that the reason these tests may favor men over women is because men are more willing to guess on tests. A significant discrepancy between these two groups has only been found when a "Don't know" option that neither rewards or penalizes choosing that option is present (women have been empirically shown to be more accountable for their own knowledge and, ergo, are more likely to select "Don't know"). When there is no option for that choice, the discrepancy between men and women is reduced by half--to a point where the difference between these groups is no longer statistically significant. Therefore, the assertion that differences in guessing explains differential ACT/SAT/GRE performance in nonsense.

Secondly, ETS closely monitors subgroup performances on each individual test item before mail you your scores. I'm not sure how (or even if) they engage in some sort of score adjustment or eliminate the item's impact altogether if differences are found, but those items ARE typically flagged and recognized as having adverse impact (which is basically what you're talking about in your post). The claim that tests are less valid for some subgroups than others is known as differential validity--and I know, based on the I/O psychology literature at least, that the consensus among the field is that differential validity does NOT exist. That being said, the field also does not have a convincing causal model for racial or gender differences, so for that reason I am extremely, extremely skeptical that differential validity doesn't exist. There is so much that could account for differences on items (i.e., cultural exposure) even during the test (i.e., stereotype threat) that I feel it is just hasty to automatically assume differential validity isn't there.

I have tons of other thoughts on this, but I've written enough for now. Thanks for writing about this topic as it is always fascinating to discuss! :)

Great post! As regards the vocabulary issue, I would further argue that it's not just racism - it seems to me a very classist issue as well. Just my two cents.

When I started law school, it was surprising to hear "she" used as the default pronoun, as many of the profs do. A little bit disconcerting, even; it shocked me out note-taking mode every time I heard it. Especially when the prof was male, and especially when he used "she" consistently throughout the lecture, not switching it up with "he". And especially when there wasn't a tiny pause when he reminded himself that he should be using "she" sometimes.

I'm used to it now, and I think hearing the generic hypothetical clients, lawyers and judges referred to as "she" has definitely made a difference to how I envision myself in the legal community.

I so, so, SO agree with you!

Your Post = WIN.

I bought a house last year - no male partner or parental involvement, from a female owner - and all the contracts had a generic 'he'. This was done by my lawyer (a man), their lawyer (also a woman), and the broker (yet another woman). Two polite requests to fix it got no results. They said the contract said 'references to the masculine include the feminine' so it didn't matter. I said why not switch it then, if it's so unimportant? After all, this was an almost all-woman deal. No result.

Eventually I had to say, "Which part of the fact that you lot are getting nearly 40K in commissions and fees makes you think that it is OK to insult myself and the seller in this manner?" and threaten to dump the whole deal if they didn't fix it. At last they did.

The generic 'he' is one of the most insidious forms of oppression. People say it's trivial to complain, but actually, because it affects people's bargaining and hiring habits (due to expectation that competence and power come with a 'he' attached) and all kinds of knock-on effects, it is far from it.

Ok, I am with you, study after study has shown that standardized tests are unfair to women and minorities.

I take issue with a couple of examples you provided.. if you are economically underprivledged and have never sailed a boat or gone to the opera, we are talking about the GRE and someone who has already completed college. Any college worth their salt should prepare a student well enough for a GRE.

I expect people with a college degree and taking the GRE to have a broad enough knowledge base to have vocabulary that extends beyond words acquired in daily conversation (and the intelligence to take test prep seriously enough to supplement what they need to know). I also expect people who will never need to solve equations for a living to know the basics of algebra, statistics, and maybe even introductory calculus by the time they leave college and go to graduate school (the math on the GRE is embarrassingly easy compared to the verbal section). Saying that because you don't use the word "sextant" in daily conversation means its not worthy of your test is absurd. Celestial navigation and astronomy have played a role in every major world culture. You are talking about people well educated enough here to be considered for graduate degree, they should have a vocabulary that extends beyond traditional daily conversation.

I have FAR more sympathy and concern for the format and questions in the PSAT and SAT's. There's wide variation of the quality of high schools and student at that age's access to good test prep.

I think a big part of the problem is not a particular question that might be euro-centric, or oriented toward economic privledge, or male-oriented.. the best you can do with these is have other questions that are oriented in another way. However, its hard to devise hundreds of questions that have zero cultural context. The best you can hope for is a diversity of cultural context that puts everyone on a level playing field, with some questions they can relate to better than others.

The format is a far bigger issue. A multiple choice, timed test that rewards guessing caters to a specific type of intelligence. I think the SAT's have done right by going to an essay format for one section. AP and IB style exams in high school also have free form questions that they can evaluate the student's independent thought, even to the point of submitting portfolios of work along with the exam in some cases. I think those formats definitely have far more potential than traditional standardized tests to assess your knowledge of a subject.

There is a difference between requiring rote memorization and testing people on terms that they might conceivably use or need when in college. Though having a robust vocabulary is often helpful, it would be nice to learn such things in context, not out of context, since when words are related to broader concepts and a full spectrum of meaning is revealed, that is usually where learning begins.

Your piece is suggestive, and I'll have to think about it some more. Thanks!

One little point that just sort of stuck out at me:

[quote]Additionally, many of the words on the GRE are words used in 19th century Jane Austen novels (i.e. "sextant" used above)---words that I do not use in everyday conversation and/or in my writing.[/quote]

This is true, but that is exactly the point. The GRE (which is a ridiculous test in itself that reveals very little about an applicant's preparedness for graduate study) is not intended to test you on your everyday vocabulary, even your everyday writing vocabulary. It is intended to test your grasp of the building blocks of the English language and how they are used in complicated verbal situations. We can debate all day whether or not the GRE, or the Verbal section's aforementioned goal, is sexist/classist/racist/etc (and as I said, I'm going to chew on that some more--you've written a thought-provoking essay, thanks!). Your point about context is also astute, and is one of the things that pisses me off about that test, too. But it doesn't change the fact that the whole point is to test a range of words-in-a-vacuum outside of the average reader's vocabulary. Plus, it's not exactly ETS's problem if you don't choose to retain those words, because putting them into practice is indeed a choice--an urban minority poet might still opt to use "sextant" in a figure of speech, whether or not she's ever gone sailing; more, you very well may come across those words in reading (Jane Austen, as you pointed out), even if you don't use them in your own writing.

The whole GRE testing process is, though, financially discriminatory. You have to pay obscene amounts of money for the exam. You have pay huge fees for test prep books, classes, etc. to increase your chances of performing well. You have to take the time that many working people and/or people with families may not be able to afford in order to study. You have to pay $20 EACH to have the scores sent to programs. These hoops are racist/sexist/classist in themselves, and as far as I can tell are, at best, a manipulative capitalist scheme by ETS that grad programs help prop up, or at worst, another method to keep the academy free of historically "undesirable" people (poor people, working people, minorities, women with children and household responsibilities, etc.).

truetrue. I think that what you wrote under racism is also an example of classism in tests. Also, the fact that only a certain group of people can prepare for them by going to expensive classes or even know that one is expected to is a problem.

The GRE is, indeed, classic bullshit. The "skills" tested by the GRE have almost nothing to do with what someone actually does as a graduate student. They might as well give an abstract IQ test.

I took the GRE in early November, and it sounds like I took the same test prep course as you Emily. I remember when I first started researching GRE prep and found out the cost of the course, it actually brought me to tears. And I had to take private math tutoring on top of that! It was nearly prohibitive for me, and I'd be considered squarely in the middle class. I can't begin to imagine how difficult it must be for people who truly can't afford test prep. Add to that the cost of the test itself, the extra charge if you need your scores sent to more than 4 schools, the application fees... Even more infuriating to me was the fact that test prep companies have "experts" to help candidates compile a "perfect application" - and charge hundreds of dollars for that service.

Similar to your experience with the word "sextant" I remember a few times when the analogies or antonyms specifically referred to items in Christianity. Being Jewish, I had no idea what the answers were, and I'm sure I can't be the first one to have run into that problem.

I always knew that it isn't an even playing field out there, but applying for grad school has really made me see how tilted the odds are in some peoples' favor.

Not to mention classist. I'm white, and I certainly haven't been sailing.

Great article.

Disagree on the use of prep courses as being vital to a good score but honestly even having the cultural capital to know that a so called aptitude test can be learnt has racial and classist overtones.

Spot on as well on the use of 'he' in the literature.