>You can study lots of vocabulary to achieve better results on the verbal section of the GRE or similar tests. But afterwards, you will, in fact, have better vocabulary, I submit.

Yeah, but tests like the GRE claim to predict academic performance, not vocabulary. So unless you think augmenting one's vocabulary alone will make one a substantially better student, there's still a gap there.

Oh, you'll certainly be better at solving programming puzzles type of problems, but the thing is that those questions usually don't translate well into real-life problems that you'll encounter at work later. You can't architect a good solution IRL by trying to figure our what the test author wanted you to do, like with programming puzzles. And for implementing some algorithm keeping every detail of it in head definitely helps, but it's not a significant advantage over someone who just googled all those details 10 minutes ago. So both types of tests are not testing the real dev capabilities, they test how much they prepared for the test. IMO only tasking the candidate to build some real piece of software or even better refactor some real code, with enough time and full access to google and stack overflow, and being fully able to ask other people for suggestions & help will show you the realistic picture of the candidate's future performance as a part of the dev team. Put them in a real situation and give them the real type of problems, and you'll get the real results. Everything else is like giving sudoku tests hoping to choose the best mathematician.

> You can study lots of vocabulary to achieve better results on the verbal section of the GRE or similar tests. But afterwards, you will, in fact, have better vocabulary, I submit.

Maybe for a few days after the test anyways. And then...you push out those words you never use or read to make room for actual useful stuff.