Those outside the US may be unaware of the GRE, or Graduate Record Exam, an aptitude test given for admission to graduate school after obtaining a four-year college degree.

I was curious what level of vocabulary aptitude is expected, so I checked the sample tests or wordlists in three major GRE-preparation guides. Ten random selections from each:

• undermine; obsequious; blanch; dissipated; fecundity; encumber; disseminate, restive; syncopated; saturnine (Kaplan guide)
• intrepid; divulge; convention; amenable; derision; impetuous; pragmatic; mollify; ostentatious; glib (Princeton guide)
• sagacious; inept; intransigent; extroverted; prognosticate; cryptic; abstain; illicit; lucid; hackneyed (GRE for Dummies)

Would you agree with me that these are very very low expectations for a student at that level?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

It really depends on your major, I suppose. I took the GRE in case I wanted to go to grad school in Computer Science, and many of my classmates would probably have missed a large number of these words, although most of them are pretty sample. The words on the test were significantly harder, and often were distinguishing betweens shades of grey as in a dictionary, something I'm not particularly good at, since most of these words I picked up from books, where I inferred the definition, or my father, who told me what he used it to mean, not the "book" definition.

Of the first list, fecundity is tricky, syncopated might not be known by a non-musician, and saturnine is one of those words I can never remember. Of the second, only mollify is even rare, the rest aren't even uncommon, I mean, divulge, convention? These are kid words. Of the last, none pose any problems whatsoever, although the slower student who hadn't seen sagacious might not put together sage-acious, especially if they are in a science field.

Still, having read many academic papers written by engineers, the level of grammar and vocabularly is startlingly poor, and often require several read throughs just to figure out what they mean. Of course, I've read papers by linguists which are almost as bad, since while their vocabulary is excellent(sometimes too excellent), the sentence constructions are often exotic, and their grasp of explaining scientific knowledge a tad off.

Of course, I took the GRE cold, so I couldn't really tell you the correlation between the guides and the test, except that just knowning the definition of every word in every question, still doesn't help you get a good score, especially if you didn't crack open a dictionary, and while I breezed through the math, I used all the time given to me to get a good score on the verbal section.

quote:

Still, having read many academic papers written by engineers, the level of grammar and vocabularly is startlingly poor,

Well, having posted with you for awhile, Sean, I suspect you are way out of their linguistic league.

My experience is that the correlation between the guides and the tests are pretty good.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Seanahan:
"…and often require several read throughs just to figure out what they mean. Of course, I've read papers by linguists which are almost as bad, since while their vocabulary is excellent(sometimes too excellent), the sentence constructions are often exotic, and their grasp of explaining scientific knowledge a tad off."

Seanahan, are you leading by example?read throughs Try reads through. We could argue about too excellent, which sounds initially like a tautology. And, a tad offa tad off. I don't think so.
Or are you taking the Mickey?!