Physics Intentions and the GRE

In the early 1980s, three coauthors and I published a letter ( Physics Today, April 1984, page 15 ) stating that the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) aptitude tests showed that those students taking the tests and indicating physics as their intended area of study had the highest combined quantitative and verbal scores of the 98 disciplines listed. In view of evolving trends in graduate education, it seemed of interest to reexamine the quality of students planning to go to graduate school in physics, as measured by the GRE aptitude tests.

The data given here appear in the GRE Guide to the Use of Scores, available online at ftp://ftp.ets.org/pub/gre/992362.pdf, and are based on exams taken between 1 October 1997 and 30 September 2000. Test takers were grouped into 50 broad fields by intended graduate major, and mean scores are reported for each of the three aptitude tests, verbal, quantitative, and analytical.

For the physics and astronomy category, the mean score ranked first in quantitative aptitude, first in analytical, and tied for sixth in verbal (students who listed philosophy as their intended course of study ranked first in verbal aptitude). When the means are aggregated, students intending to study physics and astronomy easily rank first among the 50 categories.

Physics graduate programs are still getting good students—so good, in fact, that the aptitude tests are of limited value in predicting first-year grades in graduate school, the one outcome for which complete data are published. The correlation of first-year graduate grades with the aggregate aptitude score is only 0.20. Moreover, the best correlation is with the verbal score, which is a little surprising until one notices that the standard deviation is largest for this test. Overall, the scores are so uniformly high that they provide little discrimination.

The situation is somewhat different with the subject matter test: The correlation with first-year graduate grades is 0.27, about the same as for undergraduate grades, where the correlation is 0.28.