Do you think internationals should set for GRE?

[allamerican]

GRE test seems to be culturally and linguistically biased. A lot of American and British students flunk the test or i should say don't get decent grades in GRE. This applies to the three sections of the test; verbal, quant, and writing. I believe it is ok for internationals to be exposed to the exam, but still it is really not fair to let their grades decide for their applications status. I am fluent at two languages and I really had hard time in the exam, you won't believe it, it took me only 2 hours to complete the test, simply coz it was not worth it wasting time,trying to do the questions of the test, i would have got nothing out of it!!

What do you guys think ??

[liszt85]

GRE test seems to be culturally and linguistically biased. A lot of American and British students flunk the test or i should say don't get decent grades in GRE. This applies to the three sections of the test; verbal, quant, and writing. I believe it is ok for internationals to be exposed to the exam, but still it is really not fair to let their grades decide for their applications status. I am fluent at two languages and I really had hard time in the exam, you won't believe it, it took me only 2 hours to complete the test, simply coz it was not worth it wasting time,trying to do the questions of the test, i would have got nothing out of it!!

What do you guys think ??

So do you mean to say that you screwed it up on purpose?

What you would have got out of it was an acceptance or two from the schools you've applied to.

[rocky2]

i am an international student..i got 1460 in GRE..i don't think GRE has much use for US students...U guys already know english well...No need for antonyms and synonyms...also quants is also silly to take for a BS guy who has gud enough GPA.

in my country , those who take gre really mug up words in barron and all..usually they get top scores. I dnt think an American student ,with all their distractions and the seeming stupidity of this test, will be able to do like this. (mug up and really devote themselves for this test )

However IF internationals are being evaluated using GRE scores, i dnt think it can be avoided for American students. (unfair it seems)

[liszt85]

i don't think GRE has much use for US students...U guys already know english well...No need for antonyms and synonyms...also quants is also silly to take for a BS guy who has gud enough GPA.

in my country , those who take gre really mug up words in barron and all..usually they get top scores. I dnt think an American student ,with all their distractions and the seeming stupidity of this test, will be able to do like this. (mug up and really devote themselves for this test )

If you reason as above, it holds for international students too. TOEFL is a good enough test to judge if you have a practical knowledge of the language.

Judging from what you've written, I suspect I'm from your country too. I scored 1390 and I spent two-three days with the Barron book and read through 15 word lists and the high frequency wordlist. Indian students normally spend months "mugging up" the words on that list because we do not embrace a culture of reading fiction (which uses richer and more flowery language), especially a majority of students ending up in engineering colleges (I know for a fact that most of my IITian friends don't read novels at all, if at all they do, its sci-fi and is in most cases a very recent activity, i.e., almost no fiction reading done in school days other than the drama text books). If that were not the case, there would be no difficulty in guessing word meanings from their roots and other such hints.. I mean, I surely could have scored much higher had I spent a few weeks reading those wordlists but I was confident that I'd attain, without all of that effort, what was necessary not to get eliminated at the screening stage of admissions. So that way I think the GRE verbal test is an unfair test to administer to international students! A native language speaker might be able to guess a lot of right answers but an international student (in the usual cases) will find it impossible to do that. This is why they learn the words by heart. The human memory is capable enough to acquire and retain 50 wordlists in a few months' time without actually retaining any procedural information about any of it, which should originally have been the intention of the verbal test in the first place!

So finally I agree with what you said, if we guys have to present GRE scores, its only fair that everybody is required to do so, because any line of reasoning that can be given to justify why one group should be omitted from the process, can be applied to the other just as easily.

[allamerican]

I didn't get a bad score on purpose. My major is linguistics; i am not very familiar with maths to do well on the quant. Some of the schools in the states only require the Toefl test from internationals, which is fair. I will get acceptance from one or two of the schools, but not because of the GRE, it is the only weak think in my apps.

[ridgey]

I'm a native English speaker and international.

The GRE just seems bizarre to me - before I can do a PhD, I have to prove I can do maths at the level of a twelve year old and deduce the meanings of words absent any context? BIZARRE!

I wonder about the extent the US's reverence of entrepeneurship has played a role in the dominance the GRE has. There is a huge profit being made by ETS, and that profit increases the more they can convince adcoms to value the GRE. Not to mention the spin-off prep industry.

I understand the idea that the GRE is a consistent measure,while things like GPA can reflect differences in schools rather than students. Honestly, though, anyone who is a university graduate, and doesn't have disabilities that cause them to test poorly, should be able to do well on the test. The fact that it is so necessary in the eyes of adcoms suggests to me that there are serious flaws in the avarage US undergrad program if large numbers of the people considering graduate study can't demonstrate enough critical thinking to do well on the test (NOTE: that comment was in regard to the education people have received, NOT their ability. I'm NOT saying the GRE is a measure of intelligence, or that doing poorly on it makes one unitelligent).

The thing is that in the admissions process overall, internationals are at a very real disadvantage. Finding the GRE easier (language issues aside - most schools will disregard non-native English speakers' GRE v in favour of TOEFL) than US students do doesn't mitigate this.

Honestly, I think the GRE is a crock. But it will be a strong point in my applications, compared with the laziness my GPA reflects.

[samsarictraveler]

The GRE is basically only useful as a sorting device. Graduate get large numbers of applications from hugely unqualified individuals. It saves time and money to weed out people using a single number (ok 3 numbers).