Free Republic

For ten years I served on the GRE Literature Exam committee. The exam is one of the special subject matter exams separate from the regular GRE (with math, verbal, analytical sections), and several English departments require that applicants take it. Each year five of us would meet for several days at Educational Testing Service’s campus outside Princeton to pore over data on prior tests, review the performance of each question, and select new passages and craft new questions for the next administration. During my tenure, five years of it as chairman, the number of departments in the United States including...

I have worked in academic science my entire life and I have never seen any sign of racism, systemic or otherwise. On the contrary, I have seen people go to considerable lengths to aid able minorities. Yet a petition entitled is circulating nationally complaining that: women and “people of color” are under-represented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math); that this is “systemic racism;” and that the cure is to change science (although it isn’t put quite like that). If enough signatures can be gathered, the petition is apparently to be published in Science, one of the two leading general-science journals...

A number of colleges around the country are temporarily loosening their standardized testing requirements amid the coronavirus pandemic. All eight Ivy League schools will be test-optional for the coming admissions cycle. Initially, this applied only to SAT and ACT exams. But more and more graduate schools have started accepting students without GMAT and GRE scores, as well. U.S. schools reconsidered their application processes for the upcoming academic year because of the unfavorable consequences of COVID-19 coupled with stricter immigration policies toward foreign students, which adversely affected application rates. Within the last month, several MBA programs, including the University of Virginia’s...

Both Princeton University and Brown University have announced that many graduate and doctoral programs will no longer require applicants to submit the traditionally required GRE standardized test scores.Reasoning for the change focuses around increasing the "diversity" of the student body and the “biased” nature of standardized testing. Two Ivy League universities have announced that many graduate programs will no longer require the traditional standardized Graduate Records Examination testing requirements for applications, citing reasons pertaining to "diversity" and concerns that such tests are "biased" against minority and low-income students.Both Princeton University and Brown University recently announced that they are moving...

When the University of Arizona started accepting a generic graduate school exam for law school applicants last year, the national group that oversees such admissions chastised the university and threatened to oust it from its membership. But now that Harvard, the gold standard, is following suit, there is growing hope that dropping the traditional Law School Admissions Test as a requirement for applicants across the country could lead to a larger and more diverse group of lawyers entering the field.