Thread by @blog_supplement

There has been some talk among American academics to do away with a gatekeeping exam called the GRE for admission to American grad-school. In our days that exam was in part IQ test, i.e. the verbal+quantitative sections and partly claptrap (a 3rd part I forget). The 1st 2 parts

was indeed reasonably correlated with people IQ but not the best measure of g as it could be gamed by those of above average but not spectacular IQ. Indeed as a package it was gamed to a large extent by people from say India and the chIna-s in our days. It is true that it was

reasonably effective in filtering people who intended to attend American univs for professional degrees -- among Indians that mainly included people wanting to credential themselves for tech, business or finance. However, it was a rather poor predictor of whether someone would

be able to do decent science. Hence, having it as gatekeeping exam for grad school was indeed pretty useless & doing away with GRE proper for research programs might be a good idea. However, this academic movement also wants to do away with something called the AGRE which was

specific to subject you wanted to specialize in. I my day I recall exploring the biology, biochem/molbio (which I took finally) & chemistry AGREs. This I felt was actually a good test for your knowledge in the specialty you were choosing. It was probably even better designed than

the entrance exam for an Indian PhD program, which in our days was called the CSIR (an easy test for any serious student). Hence, doing away with AGRE seems quite stupid. The best would be to dump GRE and simply have AGRE for a research program. Some Indian PhD programs had their

own additional gatekeeping tests. I took 2 of these decades ago: the integrated PhD entrance for the Indian institute of Science & that for TIFR/NCBS (unfortunately now aping occidental sjw). I must say both exams were well-designed and followed up with a good in person interview

In the end for a person serious about an academic career there is no substitute for a detailed knowledge of the field and a "divya-chakShus" for making discoveries. The latter cannot be easily tested before hand; hence the former should be examined. It should have an element of

surprise that levels the field. For example, in my days many of our acquaintances were learning by rote the structure of ATP which was one of the common questions in the exam. If they had been taken by surprise they would have failed this basic probe weakening the "gaming". In

the past 30 years in fields like molbio/biochem for most part the American univs have seen grad students as a labor market who will perform leg work in the trenches. This really did not need a serious probe and only a general IQ check. As a result it has created an academic ponzi

scheme that Indian programs are forced to emulate. As a result there are tons of doctors of philosophy who should instead be termed certified technicians