Ask HN: do contest/test taking skills correlate with research skills?

2 pointskunqiana16y ago7 comments

what are your thoughts on this?

7 comments

7 comments · 2 top-level

neilc16y ago· 5 in thread

No, they obviously do not. (Being bright is always helpful, of course, but they are pretty different skill sets, I think.) This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top research PhD programs, in CS at least.

plinkplonk16y ago

"This is supported by the fact that marks/GRE scores aren't particularly important for admission to most top research PhD programs, in CS at least."

Is this really true? (honest question). I can imagine GRE scores not being important, but I always thought that good grades were a kind of baseline for admission. As a thought experiment, do people with terrible grades,(but good research backgrounds, say) get into a good PhD program in CS?

Xichekolas16y ago

As someone that just went through the grad school app process, I can say that most schools have GRE minimum scores, except for the top schools (everyone that MIT admits is in the top 10%, so it's not really a good indicator for them). So really you need good GRE scores to not be disqualified, but they don't actually get you in anywhere.

neilc16y ago

Well, for both grades and GRE scores, the assumption is that you're going to do at least decently: if you had truly terrible grades, then that would raise a lot of questions about your work ethic / interest in the subject / etc (those questions might be addressed if you had strong letters of recommendation from well-known professors who explained why you did badly, for example).

But certainly the top schools don't simply take the students with the best GRE scores or marks: there are many rejected applicants with perfect GPAs and great GRE scores, but no research experience.

1 more reply

jibiki16y ago

I think there is some correlation. If you are an American IMO contestant, you have a much higher chance of doing good mathematical research than a randomly chosen American.

antiform16y ago

That certainly seems true, but how much of that is because by doing so you get to go to a school like Caltech, Harvard, or MIT? A more interesting question to me would be whether American IMO contestants have a better chance of doing good mathematical research than other math majors at their school. But it's hard to come to any definite conclusion, especially given the small sample size and the difficulty of classifying what is "good research."

mechanical_fish16y ago

You've neglected to name: a field, a sample group, and a definition of "research skills".

Among the general population, skill at taking physics tests probably correlates pretty well with skill at doing physics research -- both are dominated by people who know something about physics.

Once you're among the people in the physics Ph.D. program at an Ivy League university, the correlation is pretty weak.

Of course, to the extent that you measure "research skill" by things like "number of papers produced" or "amount of grant money attracted", anything that helps you get a more prestigious adviser at a prestigious university is correlated with "skill". Ergo, it doesn't hurt to be good at taking tests. But after you've passed your graduate qualifying exam, you can afford to stop worrying about tests, pretty much forever. Real life -- even university life -- is about other things.

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