> (I have heard Chinese graduate students in the United States, students in nonquantitative subjects, deride the mathematics section of the GRE general test used for graduate school admission as a test of "junior high math," and that is literally true in terms of the standard curriculum in China.)
this is true for students educated in the US as well! it's super frustrating, because you're staring at trig identities that you last looked at ten years ago.
Agreed. I always assumed the GRE must have been designed to accommodate/calibrated to humanities and social science grad students (or other majors without a significant math component) more than STEM students. Almost every CS friend I had either scored a perfect score or missed only one. It was a little frustrating, as there's no room to differentiate students who are average from those who are outstanding.
Same story here. I was actually a math major and took the general GRE (which I believe is what we are discussing) in my senior year. I only studied the night before, just to see if their prep guide included any funky vocab or other memorization questions. I looked at some vocab, spent 10 minutes reviewing geometry and trig identities, and called it a night. Turns out I didn't even need any of it.
(I did get one question wrong, though, and looking back I definitely know which one. It was an easy one in the middle of the exam questions and I think I just messed up a concept like "less than" instead of "less than or equal to".)
All my math/C.S. friends thought it was really easy and I think the worst score I heard from them was 720 / 800.
Interestingly, though, back when I took it the average score for the math section was notably higher than for the other sections. Just by missing 1 question I think I was bumped down to about the ~90% percentile.
> I always assumed the GRE must have been designed to accommodate/calibrated to humanities and social science grad students (or other majors without a significant math component) more than STEM students.
This is probably true. I mean, this is why we have GRE subject tests...
Admittedly I've not kept up with the GRE since I took it in 2004. It was computer adaptive at that point, but I found it fairly easy (and had a perfect score on the math section)
this is true for students educated in the US as well! it's super frustrating, because you're staring at trig identities that you last looked at ten years ago.