The Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a standardized test required for admission to most advanced degree programs in the humanities and sciences, is not doing its job, according to the company that administers it.
While the GRE continues to perform its straightforward academic purpose—filtering qualified applicants by a standard metric for math and language skills—it’s failing in a social function it wasn’t designed to perform, vice president of the Exam Testing Service (ETS) David Payne told Inside Higher Ed. Payne doesn’t want to see the test abandoned by graduate admissions, per se, but he does worry its rampant “misuse” by admissions departments may be responsible for a lack of diversity in academia. Take one example cited in Inside Higher Ed’s story:
Citing the findings, ETS has taken a hard look at its own role in a failure to diversify the groves of academe: “[Payne] also noted that the various biases Posselt uncovered (an obsession with both elite undergraduate colleges and a high narrow band of acceptable GRE scores) both hinder the enrollment of minority and female candidates.”
And, in righteous response, the testing service is proposing research to prove its relative unimportance to grad schools. Payne said ETS will begin guiding graduate departments away from a preference for students with the most elite test scores. The reason: he believes future research will reveal that admitted students with slightly lower scores than a program’s acceptable norm will do just as well.
