GRE Philosophy?

[slinger]

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This probably has been bought up before, but I would like to know everyone's thoughts on it. No right or wrong answer here.

Does a GRE accurately paint a picture of who would be most qualified to successfully complete a graduate program in the field of Psychology?

As an aside, is there any correlation to low GRE scores and horrible practitioners?

 

[erg923]

I doubt someone has done a study of GRE and therapist performance. I dk what the result would be, but obvioulsy thats not the purpose of the GRE.

Yes, there is good research that GRE predicts performance during ones first year of grad school. That's why it is used. I am not sure if there are studies that show it predicting attrition vs successful completion. I remember vaguely that there may be, but I'm not sure about this.

 

[deadmau5]

correlations to some definition of academic success have only been found to be a maximum of 0.35 - weak to say the least.

 

[Ollie123]

I'll push what erg said a step further and actually say that the GRE seems to be associated with more than just first year grades, but grades throughout grad school, faculty ratings, comps performance, publication record, etc. I'm unaware of any studies looking at how it specifically relates to practice. Sometime back I posted a handful of articles in a thread on the GRE that discuss these issues, a search may turn it up.

My personal view: Is it good enough on its own? Almost certainly not, but it isn't used in that manner. I'm not sure what unique contributions it makes to the model...I don't think that research is out there. I do remember one meta showing it was generally a stronger predictor than undergraduate GPA though I don't know the difference was significant (or even tested). I find it hard to find fault with schools using it given most evidence indicates that it is positively correlated with important markers of graduate student success. Most people are familiar with Sternberg's paper, but no one (including me) seems to have read up on the more recent work, that from what I can tell from my brief glances at it seems to be much higher quality. The bigger question is what sort of objective measures could we replace it with, if we don't want to use it. I'm not aware of any good alternatives that don't introduce other problems, or don't have any evidence to support their use.

 

[jekyl]

I agree with the above comments. It's merely a data point to help graduate programs select people who can complete the program. I think it's most helpful in identifying aptitude to be educated (take tests, remember concepts, etc.). Intuitively, I feel that it's not much of a predictor for how well someone would be in a therapeutic relationship. I would imagine there are people who score poorly on the GRE but are great clinicians. But from a graduate school point of view, they probably would not select someone with a horrible GRE as they might not have much confidence in their ability to do well academically (regardless of other talents).