So one of the best standardized tests I’ve ever taken is the Subject GRE. When I was applying for PhD programmes I and a few of my colleagues took it. It was perfect - it tested both knowledge and critical thinking skills and experimental design. It was obscure so no material was available for specific training.
In the end the scores were so accurate in predicting eventual success - a decade later, the folks who got 96% plus are all either professors or deliberately chose not to, while the rest just took industry jobs (and in my opinion because they realized that’s best for them).
Here’s the kicker - every institution explicitly said they will NOT consider these scores as part of admission process. None of the people who got in the top percentiles (4 I know) made it to a top 10 institution in the US, while a bunch of others did because they had paper authorship in their undergrad. But paper authorship in undergrad has NO correlation with your actual scientific skills! It just meant you were connected and or a hustler. It’s sad that such an awesome test is deliberately ignored by these institutions.
The irony was that these tests were also not elitist. All you needed to do was thoroughly read Lodish and Lehninger and you’re good. We did study in a semi-premium institution in India, but by no means were we privileged by any special facilities or help (at least in the context of this test). The only barrier might be the test fee itself if anything.
Respectfully, I call bullshit. You can't quantify success in a PhD with a single variable. There are a billion ways research can go right or wrong -- irrespective of your personal pedigree. Your ideas might be too early or late for your community to grasp, maybe you appeal to the wrong audience, maybe you're unaware of an application of your research, maybe you don't have the right set of collaborators or need a perspective that, often times, emerges out of a lucky encounters with someone. I respect your experience but I don't want it to give people the wrong idea about research success...
> Paper authorship had NO correlation with research success
I think paper authorship demonstrates that you're willing to put in a non-trivial amount of work to persue a problem. That seems to be atleast one attractive skill in a PhD, wouldn't you agree?
Uhm, what exactly are you trying to get at? I said subject GRE is a very good measure of eventual success in academia, do you have a solid response to that or just a rambling tirade?
Paper authorship if the student is the first author shows grit and “gumption” I suppose? As if that’s what’s needed in academia at this moment (it’s important but not the main requirement). But almost no undergrad gets a first author paper. They get mentioned in the middle because they ran a bunch of sds gels. I wasn’t even interested in trying to become a professor and I got 10 papers before I finished my PhD, do you know how many I (or any of the folks I actually know who are now professors) had during our undergrad? Zero. And not for lack of trying. You know who actually got papers? The son of the department head.
The original comment, to me, reads more like "subject GRE is a definitive measure of eventual success in academia." I was arguing against the definitive part. Thanks for the clarification. Maybe it might be a good measure for your cohort, you, and people in similar situations.
> Almost no undergrad gets a first author paper
Maybe this is different in different fields but we have a lot of undergraduate first author papers in programming languages and machine learning. I mean -- through and through -- undergraduate students bringing up a topic, getting guidance from professors and senior PhD students, getting results by the end of the semester, and publishing results by next year. Even the people who end up "running the sds slides" either fall out by next year or end up working towards their own first author publications. I've always chalked this up to the experimental setup cost being very cheap in CS compared to in the "hard sciences" so most undergraduate students are already comfortable with all the tools they need to do research.
> I wasn't interested in trying to become a professor
I think this is precisely the variable that a standardized test cannot account for! I feel an "authentic" undergraduate research experience is successful if it helps students realize if research is right for them or not.
> ... papers ... the son of the department head...
I see where your frustration is stemming from. Sorry this was your first experience with undergraduate research.
I dunno, my snarky answer would probably be: Just as if they'd test for A, but you actually need to be good at B.
I've not been to any school in the US and I don't have a PhD, so all these acronyms like GPA only have a vague meaning to me. But as someone who kinda disliked school and didn't put much effort in it, I can see how school grades can be a bad proxy for university. I didn't even do that well in math in school, but I managed to go above and beyond with all my math classes for my CS degree. I'm not completely sure how the admission for PhDs work and if they look at your BSc/MSc tests... but again, I guess doing ANY work related to finishing a paper is probably closer to what you'll be doing later than e.g. your grades in database stuff when you'll be researching programming languages...
Connections and hustle are stuff you can learn. At least enough to become a professor. Most of my nerd friends who became professors learned these during their PhDs. I didn’t say they became famous professors just folks doing decent research in different corners of academia. I’ll still get my house in the subject GRE as the single most important metric if I were to choose a grad student. Not that I’m in that game anymore of course.
Can you clarify for me, a non-native speaker, what you mean with hustle here? Energetic activities or fraud? (I guess the first, but I also heard of a lot of academic frauds)
>But paper authorship in undergrad has NO correlation with your actual scientific skills!
This seems like a bad take because the goal of PhDs in the US is to produce people who can publish a lot of papers, whether that's a good ideal or not. So having produced papers as an undergrad gives you a powerful signal that you are such a person.
>Here’s the kicker - every institution explicitly said they will NOT consider these scores as part of admission process.
I know in my field, Physics, the subject GRE was very important for admissions and outside of the recent changes due to Covid I believe every top program explicitly requires the Physics GRE for admissions and its not until you get to much lower ranked programs that it becomes optional or not used at all.
Lodish (a then popular cell biology book) and Lehninger (a 1500 page biochem tome) are substantial books. 101 courses would cover the first 5-9 chapters of 25. Reading back to back and understanding all of it puts you at the top of the best students in biology in the world.
I was lucky, I genuinely loved reading them. I think I went through them both once every time I had a bad breakup lol.
It's clear they mean that the barrier to entry was available to anyone. That doesn't mean that anyone has the capacity to understand and apply the contents of the text.
> How can these be true at the same time? If you can just read a book and get a good score, why don't everyone just get the good score?
All you need to do to get 4.0 in Calculus 1, 2 and 3 and Real Analysis is work through Stewart, doing all the questions. Just because it’s simple to describe doesn’t mean it’s easy.
>while a bunch of others did because they had paper authorship in their undergrad. But paper authorship in undergrad has NO correlation with your actual scientific skills! It just meant you were connected and or a hustler
uh, the whole point of a phd is learning how to produce scientific knowledge usually in the form of a paper? I can't think of a better measure for that then if you have experience publishing papers because that means you've contributed to the production of some scientific knowledge? sure there's tons of variability there due to circumstance, but I think my point holds
and finding connections is bad? the scientific process is one of cooperation, teams building off the work of other teams. the lone polymath is a long dead myth.
and again, having hustle is bad? I think you'd want someone who can be self motivated enough to get involved with research going on at their university
Getting a paper in undergrad has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to be a good scientist or even a good PhD student. I’m talking about regular smart kids though, not people you could call a True Genius™. As I mentioned above, most undergrad paper authorship is peripheral where you just succeeded in establishing yourself in a lab long term and contributed to some research.
It’s great experience but I am saying again that my personal experience suggests this to be a worse indicator of success than a good standardized test.
>As I mentioned above, most undergrad paper authorship is peripheral where you just succeeded in establishing yourself in a lab long term and contributed to some research.
and what do you do in a research lab as an undergrad? you contribute to research of course. you plan, monitor, and execute experiments. you write up the results and their impacts, limitations, and related aventures for future work. you work with others in a research environment. you gather the nexessary background knowledge required to understand the field of research. in short, you do most every you would do in a PhD just with more guidance. you're not giving much reasoning beyond your "personal anecdote".
All of us did all of the above - no one finishes undergrad without extensive lab experience and expects to get into a good institution for a PhD directly. The main differentiator is whether you get a paper out of it. I worked every evening and summer all through my undergrad in multiple labs without ever coming close to a paper. This outcome is often out of the undergrads hands - except again if you’re connected or are a hustler just hunting a paper without trying to get a variety of experience.
As I mentioned above, I chose not to go the academic route past my PhD. I don’t believe it’s a viable system and want no part in perpetuating it. Not that I didn’t have a choice (my professors actively encouraged me to do so, which they typically don’t to most of their students).
In the end the scores were so accurate in predicting eventual success - a decade later, the folks who got 96% plus are all either professors or deliberately chose not to, while the rest just took industry jobs (and in my opinion because they realized that’s best for them).
Here’s the kicker - every institution explicitly said they will NOT consider these scores as part of admission process. None of the people who got in the top percentiles (4 I know) made it to a top 10 institution in the US, while a bunch of others did because they had paper authorship in their undergrad. But paper authorship in undergrad has NO correlation with your actual scientific skills! It just meant you were connected and or a hustler. It’s sad that such an awesome test is deliberately ignored by these institutions.
The irony was that these tests were also not elitist. All you needed to do was thoroughly read Lodish and Lehninger and you’re good. We did study in a semi-premium institution in India, but by no means were we privileged by any special facilities or help (at least in the context of this test). The only barrier might be the test fee itself if anything.