GRE - The Happy Eugenics

As many of you know, I have a certain beef with the entrance exams for graduate school, or the GRE. Admissions committees use these scores to assess whether a college student is capable of continuing on to PhD or Master's level study. There's only one problem, the test is both horribly exclusionary to underrepresented students and they're completely misused in most instances.

Ok, so that's two problems.

I'll try to not go into too much detail, but I believe the GRE is the direct offspring of the Eugenic movement's search for the intellectual superiority of white people. You're first reaction to that statement might be surprise or defensiveness, but this search was a real occurrence that happened about one century ago. The search for racial intelligence differences could even be traced back to the 16th century. However, back then, the search for these intelligence differences seemed no more controversial than GRE scores appear to us today.

Francis Galton, a relative of Charlie Darwin, wrote about psychometrics and eugenics in the late nineteenth century. He began to observe that people of African descent knew so much less than the average, cultured, Victorian white person. Maybe it was the slavery, poor living conditions, and lack of access to "proper" education, but African people seemed down-right stupid to Galton. As the unity between biological heredity and intelligence strengthened, people devised new and more refined methods of detecting someone's intellectual stature. Read the wikipedia article on this if you ever get a chance.

I don't think I have to emphasize the direct relationship between the search for intelligence, the assignment of quantitative assessment of relative academic worth, and the GRE. Both the early eugenic concept to intellectual superiority and the GRE are based on the same principles. Yet, people still use this method knowing of this racist flaw.

Of course, mentioning this discrepancy provokes a very rote response: "there is simply no other standardized way to judge people's intelligence." While being still based on the same eugenics-born mentality, there are even more flaws to that logic, even if we simply ignore the deeper context to the response. Let's take the example of a History of Science department that still uses the GRE scores to judge students. Let's assume that they have chosen to accept someone who has excellent verbal scores, but sub-standard logical reasoning scores (read: math). While I haven't looked very closely at actual numbers of times this occurs, every person who has applied to graduate school that I've spoken to has told me "admission committees don't really care about your quantitative reasoning (read: math or logical abilities)." (If you're on a History of Science admission committee, I challenge you to tell me that you haven't accepted an application that had a low logical reasoning score in the last two years because the applicant's verbal score was higher.)

Ok, so this theoretical department just made a judgment that verbal scores are more important than logical reasoning, even though the GRE is a whole test that has been broken down into constituent, scored elements (ie, verbal, math, writing, etc). Now, as I've seen, logical and methodical thought is fairly important in academic work. Yet, a committee would completely disregard a whole aspect of this test because this aspect of the test doesn't resonate with the qualities that they were assessed on when they entered graduate school. Let's be even more generous and say that someone with high verbal skills and low logic skills is more likely to fit into a department than a person with high logic skills and low verbal.

Either way, let's just hang a big sign outside the department and say "we only accept people who are like us." Of course, the department might make an exception, if you're lucky, but the message still remains, "if you're like us, you get higher priority." Even if this might not be the case, in a very rare instance, the message still remains, and those messages have their own power to exclude.

So, yes, I'm bitter about having to take the GRE. No, I didn't do poorly, either. While my verbal wasn't in the top 10% like I had hoped, it's almost there. I'm just bitter because of being forced into taking a test that makes me feel dirty. There's an element of humiliation that I don't think mainstream people feel about taking the exam. In my GRE prep book, I was informed that having an "upbeat attitude" towards the GRE makes you more likely to succeed. People who are negative or "adversarial" towards the test tend to do poorly.

Does it ever alarm them that a big chunk of those people who feel negatively about the test are under-represented students?

Which came first, the chicken or the excluded student? You decide.

Monkeys With Guns

I've been doing a lot of reading on the depiction on scientists and science in literature. What has originally started with a fascination regarding the mad scientist through history has illuminated a whole world of interactions and connections between society and the science that it creates. I've been particularly struck by two quotes:

"The plain message which physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as the linotype machine, and antiseptic operating plant or an electric tramcar, there need now at the present moment be no appreciable toil in the world and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear and the anxiety that now make human life so doubtful in its value... Science stands, a too-competent servant behind her wrangling under-bred masters, holding out resources, devices and remedies they are too stupid to use."

- HG Wells, A Modern Utopia (1908)

the second passage, I quote

They made a myth of you, professor,
you of the gentle voice,
the books, the specs,
the furtive rabbit manners
in the mortar-board cap
and the medieval gown.

They didn't think of it, eh professor?
On account of your so absent-minded,
you bumping into the tree and saying,
"Excuse me, I thought you were a tree,"
passing on again blank and absent-minded

Now it's "Mr. Attila, how do you do?"
Do you pack wallops of wholesale death?
Are you the practical dynamite son-of-a-gun?
Have you come through with a few abstractions?
Is it you, Mr. Attila we hear saying,
"I beg your pardon but we believe we have made
some degree of progress on the residual
qualities of the atom"?

-Carl Sandburg, "Mr. Attila" (August 1945)

In case you didn't remember, on the sixth day of August 1945 the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing approximately 70,000 fellow humans in the span of seconds.

I am constantly hit by the vast power and potential that science offers the world. Humanity and Nature reveal themselves to one another for brief moments. Nature reveals its terror and splendor, offering the ability to shape our destinies and possibly of molding the universe itself. Humanity, in return, shows her frightened state, that we are nothing more than startled lemurs cowering in the trees. We, as a race, have the potential to ascend to heaven, to remake the world as paradise. Instead, we satisfy ourselves by eating each other.

Even with this knowledge, or the privileged exposure to this perspective, scientists resign themselves to creating more industry, which may not even be science at all. We scientists, as an international community, compete for financial resources, power, and personal prestige. We are walking, thinking factories of technology by our own culture's social design. It is no wonder that some of the great social-scientific, reformist minds are relegated to the kiddy-table of science, Alfred Russell Wallace (the discoverer of natural selection), HG Wells (noted scientist and humanitarian), and many others. My respect for modern scientists that seriously dedicate themselves to societal improvement has increased a hundred-fold.

I can only hope to live up to their stature and wisdom. I would rather work on improving my world-community and prepare it for our scientific advances than hand guns to monkeys.