As I was on a literature search for my scholarly paper which is about GRE requirements for graduate school applications, I found an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Dan Berrett, the title of which said, “My GRE Score Says I’m Smart. Hire Me.“
Here is the link to the article:
http://www.chronicle.com/article/My-GRE-Score-Says-Im-Smart/136733/?cid=wb
Initially I thought that the content was probably about using GRE scores for hiring Graduate Research/Teaching Assistants at universities, however I was surprised when I read the entire article. The reason being that the article was actually about companies using GRE scores to hire individuals. I had no clue until now that such thing as providing your GRE scores for job applications existed in real world, but it did. Moreover, at first I thought maybe that wasn’t something legal and was most likely of one of the many cases of misuse of GRE scores, but I was wrong. ETS can officially provide GRE scores to the companies upon the approval of the test taker and many applicants have been providing their GRE scores to companies to increase their chances of getting hired.
I was already against using GRE scores for selecting graduate students and now that I found that companies look at GRE scores to sort out applicants, I am really upset. Many studies have already shown that GRE scores are only able to somewhat predict the first year graduate GPA but may not be valid predictors of other factors such as research abilities, leadership, professionalism etc. which are equally important for success of a graduate student. So, the question arises, how would GRE predict how successful a person will be in his/her workplace?
I think ETS should think more about this and not allow the use of GRE scores by companies to hire individuals. GRE scores can in no means be a valid measure of an individual’s capacity to succeed and excel at their works.
This is an indication that the professional industry is starting to change their traditional methods of hiring people. I read an article before that they also look at the soft skills and if the candidate has had any community service experience and so on. Personally I do not think the GRE score by itself should indicate someones qualifications, but generally speaking, I think its a good sign how companies are starting to come out of their bubbles now! Thanks for sharing!
I believe professional skills are more important than the GRE score, and those can be shown by many different ways, including publication or some more specific examination! GRE is nightmare to me…. I hope it wont really happen in the future~~~
I feel conflicted about this. On the one hand, as you’ve noted there are a lot of problems instantiated by using just the GRE scores to hire individuals or even for graduate admissions. But, on the other hand, are they any worse than the SATs, GREs, or other types of arguably problematic testing benchmarks? I guess for me if that’s what someone can afford it seems problematic to toss it to the side and I wonder if there’s a way we can call into question the legitimacy of tests like this across the board while also acknowledging that in the system that may be some folks’ only accessible option for movement into academia or the workforce.
Thank you Admin for Sharing these kind of valuable information.
This is really useful, thanks.