bigant
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Posts posted by bigant
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Even Stanford knows there's a problem with scholarly writing, that's why they have courses on how to improve writing:
http://www.stanford....ng/lecture1.ppt
http://lane.stanford.edu/classes-consult/laneclass.html?class-id=122
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I think the scores have to be average at the very least, because you can then make up in other areas. With a low score, the job becomes that much more difficult, unless you can prove genius levels of achievement that over-rides everything else.
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Personally, I want to go into a Ph.D program in the neuroscience of morality/emotion/intuition/affective neuroscience.
The scores etc may not stand in your way, if you've already done some interesting work in the areas you mention, ie prove your interest. If you haven't done any work, find out the research interests of the professors at the universities you seek admission for, and find someone whose interests matches yours. Then go off and do some related reading, thinking and if possible, research. Write up this research, and use it in your application. Show how the PhD will further your own research interests, and that of your professor(s).
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Nobody has yet answered why a test that aims to judge your ability to comprehend that material you will encounter in graduate school should deliberately choose clear and easy-to-understand passages. It doesn't matter if these scholars are trained in writing - they're publishing work that you need to read and understand in graduate school.
Agreed. However, in terms of “realistic testing”, there is not a single text book, paper or anything that I have read (or will read in graduate school) that does not have a title or heading, telling you what the material is about. At the very minimum, and in the interest of source attribution, the passages should have a statement that says, eg "The following passage has been extracted from the paper "The revival of European folk music in the 17th century."
This still does not excuse the badly written passages. To use a rather loose analogy, you cannot say the user of a Microsoft-based PC is superior to someone who uses an Apple, just because Apple's user interface (UI) is "easier" to use. Agreed that if a place has only Microsoft-based computers, they would want to test you on those computers. If Apple users don’t do well on the test, this doesn't mean Apple users are stupid or aren’t qualified to use computers at all. In the old days, Microsoft had text-based (MS DOS) UI, and Apple had a graphical UI. Apple’s UI would’ve meant far higher productivity, and that’s why Microsoft had to come up with Windows.
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The more needlessly complex sentence that brick has written is absurd - sure, we can keep making this material more and more needlessly complex.
Brick has shown that the original sentence is also needlessly complex, by editing it:
"The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their owneconomic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire."
It's a matter of opinion whether or not a passage is unnecessarily complex. ETS needs to lay down some baseline standards for scholarly writing used in passages, because many "scholarly" writers are not trained in writing (as opposed to being literate) and write however they want, without any regard to clarity.
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In almost all cases, they lack clarity on first blush; however, a test - by its very nature - must be this way.
The Introduction to the Analytical Writing Section of the GRE® revised General Test (Page 8, The form of your response, para 2, last sentence) says :
"What matters is not the number of examples, the number of paragraphs, or the form your argument takes but, rather, the cogency of your ideas about the issue and the clarity and skill with which you communicate those ideas to academic readers."
Clarity matters if it's the candidate doing the writing. But if it's GRE passage writing, clarity does not matter? A case of double standards.
In all of the passages that ETS selects, the meaning is there. It is sitting right on the computer screen in front of you.
Here's brick's modified "sentence" again:
"The lack of a decrease, and even the lack of a maintenance of a steady state, in the numbers of non-single women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the proliferation of electrical appliances throughout homes in the Western world, a decrease in the amount of time required to do household work -- which typically belonged to the distaff's side -- and an increase in leisure time than it did with their perception of economic need and with the fact that fewer women were remaining single, a phenomenon that shrank the availability of employers' previously-relied-upon pool of single women workers, which were often the only women those employers would hire."
Since "the meaning is there", I'm sure the highly educated examiners could figure out the meaning, had I written such a sentence in a test. What are the chances that I'd get a good score?
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these tests are extensively researched, by both ETS and independent evaluators. That's the reason everybody has to sit for an experimental section, for example. Populations and averages are compared, the test is normed, individual results are compared to future performance and results on other, similar tests. That doesn't mean they're infallible, of course--some of the research will even demonstrate specific flaws in the test. None of the questions are just made up by some dude, and it seems pretty arrogant to me when people critique standardized tests based on what makes sense to them. Not that you can't criticize! But you should have a basic understanding of the ways that tests are designed and written and some ability to read the research that looks into their effectiveness. I know hard science types don't always take the social sciences terribly seriously, but we do have methods, some of them rigorous, to look into these types of problems.
Take one item for now: passage titles. Presumably, ETS's experimental tests have not included passage titles. Is there testing research that proves that passage titles negatively co-relate with graduate study success?
- Helpplease123 and habanero
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The thing is, the GRE isn't supposed to test your reading comprehension, not really.
Why call it a reading comprehension test then?
I agree with your point about correlation, but then ETS would have to admit that it's not really a reading comprehension test.
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Now, if you take away the title and obfuscate the language, it doesn't make the problem more difficult or challenging in a true sense. It just makes it more inconvenient and tedious.
If I am asked to take a piss in the dark, and if I miss my aim and end up splashing it all over the place, would I be deemed unfit for civilized society?
Perfectly put, finknottle!
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The idea behind a research statement is actually a research question - you ask a question about a specific issue, and your research project answers that question. For example, "Why do cats chase rats?" The idea is also to pick a research question that hasn't been asked before, and for that, you will have to do some research.
To maximize your chances of admission, look up the research interests of the professors at your chosen university (which you should find on their website), and choose topics that fit THEIR interests, ie don't pick a topic that interests only you. There should be a match between what you want and what your future advisor will want.
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Not necessarily deliberately obfuscate to all, but the passages are NOT there to communicate.
Correct. It is a method of ranking candidates abilities in comprehension when things haven't been spelled out to them.
It would be great if we could get someone from ETS to confirm that it is NOT the aim of the passages to communicate.
Anybody know anybody at ETS?
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I think the point made by Eigen sums it up quite nicely, they need to differentiate between candidates somehow and clearly having no headlines/titles is one of the ways to do that.
Ok, so what I'm hearing is that the passages should NOT clearly communicate, but deliberately obfuscate (eg by removal of headlines, usage of long-winded sentences etc)?
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With due respect to KitKat, the purpose of a headline is not ONLY to help you choose which article to read. Even if you are reading a single article, a headline is still useful and necessary.
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The point I am making is, papers have titles, and titles help in comprehension (otherwise, why would titles be used?). So it is not fair to deprive test candidates of titles, even for excerpts.
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I have yet to run across a single peer-reviewed paper that uses headlines - section breaks for "Introduction" "Results" and "Discussion" notwithstanding- but I don't think that's what you were referring to.
But lets be honest, if you need a headline to tell you what a section is talking about, your reading comprehension skills are pretty low. The point of reading comprehension is to be able to figure out what's being said from the actual content!
We're certainly not reading the same papers. I've never come across a paper without a headline or title (I use the words interchangeably), eg "Nocturnal habits of lions in captivity."
Just because someone requires a headline, that doesn't mean their reading skills are poor. Imagine presenting a headline-less and title-less paper to the President of the US without any introduction, and when he asks, "What's this about", saying to him, "Are you reading skills so poor that you want a headline?"
If you look at major science journals like nature and science, there are not even those sections really.
Bigant, how much important information do you think you can really get out of the headline, when the question asks for details from the passage.
I went across to the Oxford journals website, and clicked on a random paper, http://her.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/1/83.full
‘Smoking’: use of cigarettes, cigars and blunts among Southeast Asian American youth and young adults"
Obviously, this is a headline/title. Of course, the sub-headlines such as Abstract, Introduction and so on follow a format for papers. These are all sub-headlines that help, rather than having one long piece of text. Also there is nothing preventing researchers from adding other useful sub-headlines if they think they're useful. Moreover, there's use of bold and italics text of different font sizes.
Agreed, you cannot get all the information from a headline, and that is not the job of a headline. But a headline matters.
If every article read like Newsweek, we would all get 100% of the questions correct.
Given its content, I'm guessing most readers of Newsweek are graduates. Besides, I view the reading comprehension test more like driving license tests. If everyone is proficient to a certain standard, that's all that counts. The problem with the percentile system is that it makes the test artificially difficult by sub-standard writing so that relatively few people "pass" the test.
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There are two issues here. The first is written communication. The purpose of a headline is not necessarily to help you decide what to read (eg in newspapers), but to tell you what the basic message of the text is. And it is the writer's responsibility to do give you that message. If the aim for the writer is to communicate to an audience, then it follows that headlines and so on are important and necessary. Many times the question on the GRE is along the lines of, "What is the author trying to say". It is up to the author to tell us that through the headline.
The second issue is the test. If you want to make reading comprehension as difficult as possible, there are many ways to do so, starting with removing headlines. You can make the text hard to read by with-holding punctuation, not explaining terms, jumping from one topic to another without any breaks and so on. If the idea is to make reading as tough as possible, I think we can all figure out ways to make the test so difficult that only 10 people can understand.
What the ETS folks need to decide is whether they want to test for testing sake, or to test whether someone can comprehend a piece of text through which a writer is trying to communicate.
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I am wondering why you think that you need a crutch of a headline to help you read though a passage of a couple of paragraphs, at most?
A headline is not a crutch; it is an important part of the overall text.
Besides, all writing in the real world has headlines - text books, journal articles, opinion pieces, even text-based adverts.
- Eigen and cunninlynguist
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They want to see if we can figure it out without the easy method of looking at the headline.
It's a bit like the driving license authorities saying, let's see you drive a car without a steering wheel, because the steering wheel will make the test too easy
- cunninlynguist, Eigen and Kitkat
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I'm aware that the GRE passages are taken from journals, I was using "GRE writers" as a shorthand. I've spoken to several researchers who've all told me that the quality of writing in journals is terrible. However, since these articles are always reviewed before publication, these articles go through several rounds of iteration with the editors, so that they understand what is being said. This could also mean asking the author for clarifications via email/phone. Even once the article is published, readers always have the option of contacting the author with questions or clarifications.
Obviously, this process of asking for clarifications is not available to us taking the GRE. That's why these journal articles need to be professionally edited for the GRE.
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As I said on the last page, I think the sentence is awkward and could be cleaned up- but it isn't "wrong", simply not optimal.
Nobody is arguing that the sentence is wrong.
The idea will not be hindered by the prose.
This is precisely the point. habanero's re-write, achieved with minimal "interference" to the text, is far better than the original.
I can't see why allowances should be made for writing that is opaque or awkwardly written (to put it mildly) at the graduate level. I would think that at especially at graduate level, you should be able to write clearly and concisely while still expressing your ideas. The GRE RC writers show little evidence of that.
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The reading comprehension is the worst - I fail to see how poorly structured paragraphs are related to grad school work. I mean, when I read those things, I feel like I'm reading Freshmen writing on topics they don't really know about and it's my job to seek their meaning. Ugh. I hate it! .
You're not the only one! There's another topic heading about how the GRE is flawed because of the badly written RCs.
@prithviraj I suggest you re-take. Even a good TOEFL score will probably not make up for low verbal because the GRE and TOEFL test different things. I think average verbal and average quant scores are better overall, rather than extremely high quant and extremely low verbal. Once you get to a cut-off, other things come into play, but we have to make the cut-off depending on the college.
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One part tests your ability to understand complex passages, the other tests your ability to write clearly and concisely...
Just because it’s difficult to understand a passage, that doesn’t mean the ideas in the passage are complex. Would you agree that there is a big difference between complex ideas communicated clearly, and complex ideas communicated poorly?
Heck, even the word choices are not those that you would use if you're trying to communicate as clearly as possible.
Why should faculty not have to communicate clearly? What absolves them of that responsibility? Presumably they wrote clearly as part of their GRE AWA to be able to gain admission to a graduate program. Why do they suddenly lose that ability once they get into academia?
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I'm noticing this *a lot* in all the science passages in the prep books I'm using. I could practically answer a lot of the science questions without reading the passage at all (in fact, this once saved my life on my ACT reading comprehension test, as it contained an astronomy passage - without which I would have almost surely ran out of time).
But is this common?
Safest to still read the passage, because the questions are always in relation to the passage, not necessarily the 'correct' answers.
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This is ridiculous. Was it seriously on a GRE?!
Official GRE Sample Questions:
http://www.ets.org/b...c3set1&onitem=1
See lines 34 through 42.
Fundamental flaw in GRE reading comprehension test
in GRE/GMAT/etc
Posted · Edited by bigant
There's also a writing course on Coursera on 'writing in the sciences', by Stanford. Surely ETS will wake up and smell the coffee?