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emilyrobot

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  1. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from samda in Masters: Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt---Let's talk money-not the cost but what you expect to make!   
    Oh sheesh, people interested in education aren't required to take a vow of poverty to indicate their purity. We don't do ourselves or the field broadly any favors by pretending that we're somehow exempt from the kinds of cost-benefit analyses that most adults have to do when considering a career trajectory. Especially considering the cost to attend the schools that the OP name checks, it would be crazy NOT to consider the expected salary range when you're done.
     
    Were I to go back into the field after receiving my masters, I'd be able to make anywhere from $500-$5,000 more per year than I could have with my BA and teaching certificate, depending on the district. Even though I had funding, just the opportunity cost for not working for two years works out to be around $62,000--a pretty absurd investment based on the salary return, and completely crazy if I were actually paying the $100,000ish tuition. Continuing on to the PhD, as I plan to do, extends the ceiling on my future salary significantly, but there's still a big range, depending on how productive a scholar I turn out to be. 
  2. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from cinderella in Please help! Stupid idea to go to a low ranked school?   
    Yep, the University Z might not allow you to have an outside job.
     
    As others have said, if you want the option to go into academia, you've got to go with either X or Y. Presitge, fame and impact factor are the things that the acadame runs on. You won't be able to make up that difference from a less respected program by developing an outside network (part of what going into a well-respected, highly-ranked program means is that you have an advantage in building a good network, through your advisor's contacts and through the other graduate students that you work with). You'll be more likely to do better work and develop a stronger network at a place where all the faculty is research active, the students are interested in research, and the university makes it a priotity to support research. Also, did your potential advisor at University Z come in with tenure? It might be likely that that person (like the rest of the productive faculty) might leave University Z, possibly sometime in your tenure as a student. Were that to happen, what would that mean for you?
     
    You, or your family, probably have more information about how much prestige matters in industry. I've got no information for you on that.
  3. Upvote
    emilyrobot reacted to graduatingPhD in Should you go at all?   
    The most important question, I think, you should be asking yourself in this season of acceptances is if you should go to grad school at all.  If you are in the humanities or certain fields of the social sciences, the job market is very bleak.  It may well be better when you graduate, but it may well not be.  There are troubling trends like MOOCs that, many people think, will  restructure much of education in a way that will reduce the number of tenure track hires.
     
    How bad is the job market currently?  According to Harvard, as of the fall of 2012, only 52% of those who got a Harvard PhD in the humanities from 2006-2011 had an academic job.  (And it looks like, based on some other data they report elsewhere, that about 1/3 of those are in non-tenure-track positions.)  23% were "unemployed and searching."  And due to self selection bias in reporting, this data probably underestimates the number of unployed.  http://history.fas.harvard.edu/programs/graduate/program/documents/five-year-cumulative-all-fields-2006-2011.pdf. 
     
    Because the job market, many people in the humanities, for instance, spend several years after graduating twisting in the wind with low-paid, time-consuming, and short-term lectureships and visiting assistant professorsips before either get a tt job or quitting academia.  If you are really committed to an academic career, you may well be signing up for a PhD + several years of uncertainty and scrapping by after that.
     
    Of course not all fields and subfields are made the same.  Some of your fields will have excellent job prospects; others, terrible.  It behooves you to research the matter and think about the kind of bet your are making.  You are giving up 5-8 years of pay, and more importantly, 5-8 years in which you could be launching a different career.  When you graduate at age 30 with a PhD, you will have opened a few doors (for instance, you are an attractive hire for a private high school), but shut many more.
     
    I am not saying you should not go.  That is a decision to make yourself.  Personally, I have found getting a PhD immensley rewarding.  But it has also come at a great cost. 
  4. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from kittythrones in Please somebody answer! Should I wait another year to reapply?   
    Jeff,
     
    DO NOT GO TO A PHD PROGRAM WITHOUT FUNDING. Do not do it. There are a number of very good reasons to decline your unfunded offer:
     
    First, you may not finish your degree at all. 50% of all PhD students don't, and often they leave the university without their degree after spending more than 3 years in their program. http://chronicle.com/article/PhD-Attrition-How-Much-Is/140045/ Attrition isn't a thing that gets talked about much around here, but it's real and it happens to a lot of people, and not having funding makes it more likely. Second, if you do manage to finish, you're unlikely to find the kind of academic job you want. Tenure-line professorships are disappearing, and the academic job market in the humanities, is dismal. There are plenty of folks with degrees from top programs who can't find jobs and who are scraping by adjuncting for less than minimum wage. Grad school is a gamble that is unlikely to pay off, and the more debt you need to take on to get though, the riskier it is. Cf http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 and http://chronicle.com/article/Just-Don-t-Go-Part-2/44786
     
    Have your mentors at NYU been talking to you about this? About how often people don't finish? About how bad the job market is? If not, they are failing you as a student, and you should be mad about that.
     
    You might be able to revamp your application for next year, but I don't have any specific advice for you about that (although, looking at the list of schools you applied to, I'm wondering if you were choosing schools based more on location than on best fit with professors, which, if so, is something you could fix). You're worried about what might happen if you don't get in anywhere next year, and I can see how that would be a scary thought. Here's the thing, though--it might be the best thing that ever happened to you. Academia is a mess, and it's going to get worse. The world is a big place, and there are many many jobs you might enjoy and many kinds of satisfying things you could do with yourself. Not getting a PhD doesn't have to be about closing a door, it can be aboout opening a hundred different ones.
  5. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from ctcpx084 in Masters: Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt---Let's talk money-not the cost but what you expect to make!   
    Oh sheesh, people interested in education aren't required to take a vow of poverty to indicate their purity. We don't do ourselves or the field broadly any favors by pretending that we're somehow exempt from the kinds of cost-benefit analyses that most adults have to do when considering a career trajectory. Especially considering the cost to attend the schools that the OP name checks, it would be crazy NOT to consider the expected salary range when you're done.
     
    Were I to go back into the field after receiving my masters, I'd be able to make anywhere from $500-$5,000 more per year than I could have with my BA and teaching certificate, depending on the district. Even though I had funding, just the opportunity cost for not working for two years works out to be around $62,000--a pretty absurd investment based on the salary return, and completely crazy if I were actually paying the $100,000ish tuition. Continuing on to the PhD, as I plan to do, extends the ceiling on my future salary significantly, but there's still a big range, depending on how productive a scholar I turn out to be. 
  6. Upvote
    emilyrobot reacted to spunky in Masters: Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt---Let's talk money-not the cost but what you expect to make!   
    "There is nothing noble about being poor"
     
    - Brian Kinney, Queer as Folk 
  7. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from Loseric in Masters: Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt---Let's talk money-not the cost but what you expect to make!   
    Oh sheesh, people interested in education aren't required to take a vow of poverty to indicate their purity. We don't do ourselves or the field broadly any favors by pretending that we're somehow exempt from the kinds of cost-benefit analyses that most adults have to do when considering a career trajectory. Especially considering the cost to attend the schools that the OP name checks, it would be crazy NOT to consider the expected salary range when you're done.
     
    Were I to go back into the field after receiving my masters, I'd be able to make anywhere from $500-$5,000 more per year than I could have with my BA and teaching certificate, depending on the district. Even though I had funding, just the opportunity cost for not working for two years works out to be around $62,000--a pretty absurd investment based on the salary return, and completely crazy if I were actually paying the $100,000ish tuition. Continuing on to the PhD, as I plan to do, extends the ceiling on my future salary significantly, but there's still a big range, depending on how productive a scholar I turn out to be. 
  8. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from OCD or Perfection? in Masters: Harvard, Columbia, Vanderbilt---Let's talk money-not the cost but what you expect to make!   
    Oh sheesh, people interested in education aren't required to take a vow of poverty to indicate their purity. We don't do ourselves or the field broadly any favors by pretending that we're somehow exempt from the kinds of cost-benefit analyses that most adults have to do when considering a career trajectory. Especially considering the cost to attend the schools that the OP name checks, it would be crazy NOT to consider the expected salary range when you're done.
     
    Were I to go back into the field after receiving my masters, I'd be able to make anywhere from $500-$5,000 more per year than I could have with my BA and teaching certificate, depending on the district. Even though I had funding, just the opportunity cost for not working for two years works out to be around $62,000--a pretty absurd investment based on the salary return, and completely crazy if I were actually paying the $100,000ish tuition. Continuing on to the PhD, as I plan to do, extends the ceiling on my future salary significantly, but there's still a big range, depending on how productive a scholar I turn out to be. 
  9. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from Professor Plum in Fully Funded MA History and Education Programs   
    Get a job and teach. In your first year or two of teaching you will probably not have the time or energy to pursue a degree in the evening. If you're teaching, your district may pay for all or part of your graduate school tuition. You're also better off deciding on a grad program once you have some experience in the classroom and on the job market. 
  10. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from CageFree in Fully Funded MA History and Education Programs   
    Get a job and teach. In your first year or two of teaching you will probably not have the time or energy to pursue a degree in the evening. If you're teaching, your district may pay for all or part of your graduate school tuition. You're also better off deciding on a grad program once you have some experience in the classroom and on the job market. 
  11. Downvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from unpretentious username in The GRE and MLK Jr.   
    I like to spend this day every year doing a little reading about Dr. King, and I happened across the following in one of the online document archives I was browsing:

    "King took the examination on 3 February. A table enclosed with the test report indicates that his verbal aptitude score is in the second lowest quartile and his quantitative score is in the lowest ten percent of those taking the test. In the advanced test in philosophy, King's score (on a scale of 100) places him in the lowest third, while his other scores (on a scale of 800) are in the lowest quartile in all the subject areas except literature, where he placed in the top quartile."

    http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_510306_000/

    So, whatever the GRE is measuring, it certainly isn't an infallible measure of your global verbal skills, guys. Arguably the greatest orator in American history couldn't crack the 50th percentile on the verbal. Just thought I'd add some perspective for all of us who are fretting over how we measure up.
  12. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from prefers_pencils in Interview Preparation   
    I don't know about the sciences, and maybe it's different, so take the following with the amount of salt needed

    I've talked to several profs at one of the universities that I'm applying to, and the conversations were so informal that I kind of didn't even realize that they were probably interviews. There were no pop quizzes, nothing that could remotely be called "grilling", we just kind of talked--about the state of the field, about my previous work, about their work and how they work with grad students, about the strengths of their program. It felt like they were not so much trying to vet my qualifications, but rather that they had decided I was qualified based on my application, and were trying to get a sense of what kind of co-worker I'd be. Based on my experience, I'd give the same advice I give to folks going into job interviews--be polite and personable, have a few (concise!) things in mind to say if they open with "tell me about yourself" and have a few (smart, thoughtful) questions in case they ask if you have any at the end of the talk. Keep in mind that they may be trying to impress you as much as you're trying to impress them.

    How were your other interviews? Did you feel like you were being examined?
  13. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from blaspheming in Evanston, IL   
    I grew up in Evanston, so maybe I can give folks a good orientation to the area. It's a beautiful little city, with a bit of a college town feel (lots of students, coffee shops etc), very easy access to Chicago (through the CTA, the Metra, some buses and also NU runs some shuttle buses that I don't know much about but I think are free for students). It's suburban, but still diverse, lots of trees and parks and beaches, and very family friendly. It's relatively walkable, but having a car isn't a major inconvenience the way it can be in some Chicago neighborhoods. One thing to note about Evanston: it was a dry city for a veeeeeeery long time, and although things have relaxed somewhat since the heyday of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the liquor laws are still pretty strict. The result is that there are like, maaaaybe 3 bars in Evanston? If nightlife is important to you, you may want to consider living in Chicago and commuting in. If you're looking into that, there's some really good information in the Chicago thread. Personally, I love Rogers Park, and I feel safe in most of the parts of it, but everyone has a different comfort level, and the best thing to do is visit and walk around and see how you feel. Living in Evanston is a little more expensive that many neighborhoods in Chicago, but it's not insane. Goldielocks, I think you'll find that 1600$ in a housing budget will go pretty far.

    Unlike Chicago, Evanston doesn't have a lot of distinct neighborhoods. The best way to orient yourself to the area is to think in terms of the El, I think. The Purple line runs through Evanston from Linden (the border of Wilmette, the next suburb north of Evanston) south to Howard (the border of Chicago). The Purple line runs til about 1 AM (later on Saturdays). Typically, if you're heading south to the city, you'll change to the Red line at Howard, but during rush hours, the Purple line extends to the downtown Chicago Loop as an express train (very convenient for anyone who works downtown). The main business district in Evanston is located around the Davis stop, where there's a pretty good collection of restaurants, shops, coffee places, a great movie theater etc. There's a little cluster of bars towards the south end of Downtown Evanston (kind of by the Dempster El stop). NU is in the northeastern bit of the city, along the lake shore, with the most convenient train stops for campus being Foster and Noyes (pronounced "noise") but I think the NU student shuttle stops at Davis. There are smaller business strips near the Main street (south of downtown) and Central street (north of downtown) El stations. As a general rule, you're going to be more likely to find apartment buildings east of the train line, while west of the train line is mostly single family homes (some of them modest, and some of them lavish). Apartments in South Evanston (closer to the Main Street or South Boulavard El stations) are more likely to be inexpensive.

    The Apartment People, linked up-thread is by bellefast, is a good resource. You can make an appointment with them, and they'll take you around to see places that fit the perameters you set with them. This is paid for by the landlords who list their places, so it costs you nothing! Craigslist is a good way to find apartments, too. Hope that was helpful info!
  14. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from Blurry in Chicago, IL   
    Hey Blurry! I lived in Logan Square for a long time, so I'd be able to answer specific questions about that area, if you have any. It does tend to be a pricier area than the other two you mentioned, but reasonable living is still possible around there. Bucktown is also something you might want to check into.

    Behavioral isn't wrong, though--plenty of landlords will list their places as "steps from the CTA" when they mean "kinda close to a bus that runs once an hour during weekday rush hour". If you're not already doing this, you can easily check commute times and walking distances with the google transit directions function--it's so helpful! I'm certain that some of the places you're seeing are "too good to be true"--but some of them are not! That's just the way craigslist is. Also, keep in mind that the listing you see at this time of year are only just a fraction of the amount there will be when you're actually going to move (assuming you'll come in the late summer/early fall). Nobody plans to move during the winter if they can help it, and a lot of leases are timed to come up June 1st or October 1st. I think with an 800$ budget, you'll have plenty of good choices! If you can swing a visit a monthish before your move date, you might look into using a rental agent--they'll drive you around and show you places, at no cost to you, which is really helpful if you don't know the city.
  15. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from purpledinosaur in Chicago, IL   
    Hey purpledinosaur, congrats on your acceptance! I don't know too much about Hyde Park in particular, so I'll leave it to others to make specific recommendations about the neighborhood, but I was a vegetarian living in Chicago for about ten years, so maybe I can help out there.

    The Chicago Diner is pretty good, but I was never really the kind of vegetarian who craved a tempeh Ruben, you know? IMO, the great thing about vegetarian living in Chicago is the awesomeness of our ethnic restaurant scene--Ethiopian, Thai and Indian are all great choices for eating out where you don't have to choose between ordering "a chef salad, hold the meat" or just settling for a plate of fries. Mexican and Mediterranean places can be good, too (depends on which one). Ethnic markets are good places to find veggie/vegan friendly things to eat that aren't at Whole Foods prices (I always bought my tofu from the Korean market around the corner). I almost never felt deprived or restricted because I was veggie.

    Also, there's the nearly vegetarian (sometimes they have one fish dish on the menu) fine dining place Green Zebra. It's my favorite restaurant in the city--but fancy and pricey! Bad for a grad student budget, but great for bookmarking for celebrating achievements and special occasions!
  16. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from Blurry in Chicago, IL   
    I don't know the south side all that well, but my take on Bridgeport was never that it was unsafe, just maybe that it was a little boring. I, too, live in a neighborhood that some would consider unsafe (but that I love), though, so I know what you mean about not wanting to take the negative feedback seriously--people's perceptions of neighborhoods are not always helpful. The best thing to do is visit if you can.

    Do look into Pilsen! It's gotten a little more hip (and therefore more expensive!) over the last couple years, but there are still deals to be had. It's closer to downtown than Bridgeport is and has a good share of art galleries and cultural life. Remember, when looking into rentals in Chicago that whether or not the heat is included in the rent can make a big difference in the actual cost of living (if heat's not included, the landlord has to tell you about how much your monthly heating cost will be before you sign the lease).
  17. Upvote
    emilyrobot reacted to dm242 in Who's Applying for Fall 2012? Where are you Applying?   
    Wait how many of us are in the Chi. Im counting three right now, including me. We should set up a therapy session at my flat this weekend.
  18. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from jgilme1 in Interview Preparation   
    I don't know about the sciences, and maybe it's different, so take the following with the amount of salt needed

    I've talked to several profs at one of the universities that I'm applying to, and the conversations were so informal that I kind of didn't even realize that they were probably interviews. There were no pop quizzes, nothing that could remotely be called "grilling", we just kind of talked--about the state of the field, about my previous work, about their work and how they work with grad students, about the strengths of their program. It felt like they were not so much trying to vet my qualifications, but rather that they had decided I was qualified based on my application, and were trying to get a sense of what kind of co-worker I'd be. Based on my experience, I'd give the same advice I give to folks going into job interviews--be polite and personable, have a few (concise!) things in mind to say if they open with "tell me about yourself" and have a few (smart, thoughtful) questions in case they ask if you have any at the end of the talk. Keep in mind that they may be trying to impress you as much as you're trying to impress them.

    How were your other interviews? Did you feel like you were being examined?
  19. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from Jimmy McNulty in Thinking about apply to to GSEs - questions   
    sshopeful, IMO, your background is far from poor. You've got both practice and research experience and your GPA isn't a disaster. I Imagine there are a lot of departments that would be good fits for your interests (here's one, for one example off the top of my head, at Vanderbilt http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/teaching_and_learning/graduate_programs/doctoral_programs/language_literacy_and_culture_specialization.xml ). My guess is that you'd be most likely to find people doing work that interests you either in literacy program or in special ed programs.

    Here are the questions I think you'll need to be able to answer in order to find the best program for you: What do you want to do with your degree? Do you want to teach at a university? do research? do you want to specialize in qualitative or quantitative research, or mixed methods? Or, would you rather work in policy? be an administrator? Are you interested more in the achievement gap in terms of K-12 education, or in higher ed? Look for schools that will train you for the career you want.

    I started my search for the right grad school by reading current research. Anything that I read that made me excited, I'd look up the author and see where they taught, and then looked into what that program was like. That's the path I'd recommend to anyone. A lot of schools will have somewhere on their website the average profile of students they've admitted, in terms of GRE scores, GPA and (sometimes) years of classroom experience, and that should give you a sense of whether a given program is a reach for you or not.

    I wonder if your self-assessment of your academic record is so (overly, IMO) harsh because you're comparing yourself to other posters here, or grad school applicants in other disciplines. Keep in mind that the academic job market in the humanities is really, really dire, so there's a lot of pressure on English, History etc applicants to be perfect. There's a lot more money and a lot more jobs in Education, so having a 4.0 in everything is less important. Don't count yourself out!
  20. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from Helpplease123 in Fundamental flaw in GRE reading comprehension test   
    Right, it's not actually called a reading comprehension test. It's a graduate admissions test, designed (like IQ tests and SAT/ACT tests) to assess your aptitude, not the skills you've already acquired.

    I don't think too highly of the GREs, honestly. It's certainly not perfect test by a long shot. Some of the validity research is kinda self-fulfilling (for instance, if the receipt of fellowships is dependent in part on GRE scores, it makes sense that people with higher GRE scores would be more likely to finish their degrees, because they're more likely to get funding). A lot of the weight that admissions programs put on GRE scores has less to do with people thinking that the GRE is a great test, and more to do with how heavily US News and World Report weights average GRE scores of students when ranking programs. So, I'm not super invested in defending the test itself.

    However, as an applicant to PhD programs in education the following is kind of a hobbyhorse of mine: 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. I try not to bother Biologists with my kooky theories about how to revise taxonomies of living things (let's categorize by size and color! That just makes sense to me!), and I wish my own discipline ever got the same measure of respect.

    Whew, I guess according to the rant above, I have Feelings About This. To be clear, the above rant isn't directed to any individual person here, please don't take offense!
  21. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from shibboleth in The GRE and MLK Jr.   
    I like to spend this day every year doing a little reading about Dr. King, and I happened across the following in one of the online document archives I was browsing:

    "King took the examination on 3 February. A table enclosed with the test report indicates that his verbal aptitude score is in the second lowest quartile and his quantitative score is in the lowest ten percent of those taking the test. In the advanced test in philosophy, King's score (on a scale of 100) places him in the lowest third, while his other scores (on a scale of 800) are in the lowest quartile in all the subject areas except literature, where he placed in the top quartile."

    http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_510306_000/

    So, whatever the GRE is measuring, it certainly isn't an infallible measure of your global verbal skills, guys. Arguably the greatest orator in American history couldn't crack the 50th percentile on the verbal. Just thought I'd add some perspective for all of us who are fretting over how we measure up.
  22. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from user999 in The GRE and MLK Jr.   
    I like to spend this day every year doing a little reading about Dr. King, and I happened across the following in one of the online document archives I was browsing:

    "King took the examination on 3 February. A table enclosed with the test report indicates that his verbal aptitude score is in the second lowest quartile and his quantitative score is in the lowest ten percent of those taking the test. In the advanced test in philosophy, King's score (on a scale of 100) places him in the lowest third, while his other scores (on a scale of 800) are in the lowest quartile in all the subject areas except literature, where he placed in the top quartile."

    http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_510306_000/

    So, whatever the GRE is measuring, it certainly isn't an infallible measure of your global verbal skills, guys. Arguably the greatest orator in American history couldn't crack the 50th percentile on the verbal. Just thought I'd add some perspective for all of us who are fretting over how we measure up.
  23. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from coffeeplease in The GRE and MLK Jr.   
    I like to spend this day every year doing a little reading about Dr. King, and I happened across the following in one of the online document archives I was browsing:

    "King took the examination on 3 February. A table enclosed with the test report indicates that his verbal aptitude score is in the second lowest quartile and his quantitative score is in the lowest ten percent of those taking the test. In the advanced test in philosophy, King's score (on a scale of 100) places him in the lowest third, while his other scores (on a scale of 800) are in the lowest quartile in all the subject areas except literature, where he placed in the top quartile."

    http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_510306_000/

    So, whatever the GRE is measuring, it certainly isn't an infallible measure of your global verbal skills, guys. Arguably the greatest orator in American history couldn't crack the 50th percentile on the verbal. Just thought I'd add some perspective for all of us who are fretting over how we measure up.
  24. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from unitname in The GRE and MLK Jr.   
    I like to spend this day every year doing a little reading about Dr. King, and I happened across the following in one of the online document archives I was browsing:

    "King took the examination on 3 February. A table enclosed with the test report indicates that his verbal aptitude score is in the second lowest quartile and his quantitative score is in the lowest ten percent of those taking the test. In the advanced test in philosophy, King's score (on a scale of 100) places him in the lowest third, while his other scores (on a scale of 800) are in the lowest quartile in all the subject areas except literature, where he placed in the top quartile."

    http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_510306_000/

    So, whatever the GRE is measuring, it certainly isn't an infallible measure of your global verbal skills, guys. Arguably the greatest orator in American history couldn't crack the 50th percentile on the verbal. Just thought I'd add some perspective for all of us who are fretting over how we measure up.
  25. Upvote
    emilyrobot got a reaction from coonskee in The GRE and MLK Jr.   
    I like to spend this day every year doing a little reading about Dr. King, and I happened across the following in one of the online document archives I was browsing:

    "King took the examination on 3 February. A table enclosed with the test report indicates that his verbal aptitude score is in the second lowest quartile and his quantitative score is in the lowest ten percent of those taking the test. In the advanced test in philosophy, King's score (on a scale of 100) places him in the lowest third, while his other scores (on a scale of 800) are in the lowest quartile in all the subject areas except literature, where he placed in the top quartile."

    http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_510306_000/

    So, whatever the GRE is measuring, it certainly isn't an infallible measure of your global verbal skills, guys. Arguably the greatest orator in American history couldn't crack the 50th percentile on the verbal. Just thought I'd add some perspective for all of us who are fretting over how we measure up.
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