In looking up the percentile for a 750 Q score (about 84th percentile, which means 84% of GRE takers scored lower than I did), I saw something a bit surprising:
Between July 2003 and July 2006, over 1.2 million people took the GRE. The gender breakdown of these test-takers is 56% women and 40% men. (I assume the other 4% did not report a gender and are not actually androgynous or hermaphroditic.)
I had seen data showing that there were more women than men earning undergraduate college degrees. But I wasn't aware that graduate school hopefuls skewed female also.
A quick web search indicated that in 2005-2006, women comprised 49% of LSAT (law school admission test) takers and in 2005, women comprised 54% of MCAT (medical college admission test) takers. According to the MBA.com website, "roughly 40%" of the GMAT (graduate management admission test) takers are female.
But then when you look at the people taking the GRE Subject Tests in the mathy disciplines, you see a dearth of women. Here's the percent women in these tests:
Psychology - 77%
Biology - 65%
Literature in English - 65%
Biochemistry - 53%
Chemistry - 43%
Mathematics - 27%
Physics - 23%
Computer Science - 14%
Granted that not everyone who applies to grad school in the subject will take the GRE Subject test, depending on the requirements of specific schools, it's still a pretty glaring disparity in math, physics, and computer science. (Well, and psychology for that matter. But I happen to know that the subject test is very commonly used for clinical or counseling psychology programs - one website says it's about 90% of these programs. I think it is much less common for experimental programs to require it.)
On an unrelated note, it's interesting to see how people from different parts of the world describe this testing process: taking the test (e.g. US), sitting the test (e.g. NZ), writing the test (e.g. Canada, India, Singapore), and so on. In my experience, "surviving" or "enduring" the test may be the more apt description.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
What about "conquering" the test, "taming" the test, "attacking" the test, or even "outwitting" the test? "Surviving" and "enduring" sound not quite passive, but definitely too defensive. On the other hand, you did sound like you felt defensive. I did, too, the first time anyway.
I guess none of my words are sufficiently neutral as to the outcome except "attacking."
Well...I guess I think I chose the words "surviving" and "enduring" because they are the most true to my experience as lived. I did not mean them to imply a feeling of being unsuccessful. I'm not even sure how one would go about attacking or outwitting a test that responds to one's success by getting increasingly harder. As I said, I felt I took down the writing sections, but the quant and verbal sections do seem to require that you get through them. I don't think my experience was unusual in that regard. (Though clearly being so dazed that one is uncertain about their scores is pretty weird.)
Post a Comment