I have a physics/math BA. Do you think the measure of a physicist is their ability to solve a physics problem in 1.7 minutes? Is that why all of my physics tests were two hours long and only had four questions? What about creativity and a passion for the subject? I love physics, but grad schools need to get real. They want stellar GPAs, research experience, letters of recommendation and then the entrance exam is the complete opposite of any ‘normal’ physics test. Sure you have a fancy metric but the philosophy is rotten to the core. Everyone hates this exam for the same reason because it is a waste of fucxing time. The science is slowly dying and hopefully the admissions process for physics graduate programs is overhauled before it goes extinct.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/157514

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf02316/

Graduate schools have turned into legalized indentured servitude; although students do get to experience the joy of paying off their undergraduate loans on a pitiful stipend. I’m not buying into the GRE propaganda nor should should anyone have to pay for the privilege of taking these exams. Do you have a PhD in education? Is there only one type of physics student or does the GRE create a group think monoculture? If you want me to go to graduate school then beg. I’m happier studying physics as an independent autodidact.

Disrespectfully,
Brian Beverly

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Serway Jewett –Physics for Scientists and Engineers.

By the way, this is something that already exists at the high school level: namely, the Physics AP test. It has both a multiple-choice section and a free-response problem section, and many, many more high school students take that test than take the physics GRE. So if the AP system manages to make it work on a much larger scale, I don’t see why we couldn’t do the same thing as well.

Also, I want to address your point about statistical fluctuations. First of all, I think it’s rather easy to identify the core things that students should take away from classes in any given area of physics. In classical mechanics, that should be something like the ability to write down a (possibly complicated) Lagrangian and then find and solve the associated equations of motion. In statistical mechanics, it would be the ability to construct a partition function and solve problems based on that. In quantum mechanics, it’s variants of the Schrodinger equation and maybe some perturbation theory. None of those require one to know anything about displacement currents in capacitors or the intricacies of orbital mechanics, and indeed, I think there would be little point to my suggestion if all it did was to encourage memorization of some other set of equations. Second, it seems to me that you are saying that having fewer problems would provide less of a discriminator between students, but I don’t know that this is the case. Certainly, tests in my undergraduate classes seemed to do a pretty good job of discriminating between students, and they were all based on solving problems. Anyway, that seems like a peripheral question to me; what we should be concerned with is whether students understand physics, not whether they can do trivial computations really fast.

We really, truly, honestly go out of our way to avoid problems being solved just by “tricks” that have no relevance to doing physics or being a physicist.

And, by the way, we give moments of inertia of common objects when needed, unless we are testing the ability to so a simple integration to find on. So, GRE students, please don’t memorize that, but do memorize the formula for the integral to obtain the moment of inertia!

Actually there is a fair bit of mis-information in the comments above, and I fear that students will believe it…my hope was to help students prepare effectively for the exam.

I don’t understand why the physics subject test cannot look like the prelim I took in grad school. We had 5 hours to solve 5 problems, one from each major area of physics (stat mech, classical mech, E&M, and 2 QM problems). I think a test similar to that would be a far more accurate reflection of one’s ability to do physics than being put on the clock and having to worry about bubbling in the wrong bubble or whatever.

The worst subjects for me were electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, and optics as I’d had graduate classes in some subjects but no undergraduate classes other than freshman physics and quantum mechanics. And the thought of memorizing moments of inertia never occurred to me, it’s just a matter of integrating quickly. But if your mind is better at memorizing than calculating, it’s definitely a way to get by.

You cannot do all the problems on the GRE by doing limiting-behavior checking and units and so forth, though some can be narrowed that way. You really need to know some basic undergraduate physics. Memorizing some equations is definitely helpful.

A perfect score is most definitely *not* 85 questions. It varies from exam to exam.

ian: ETS actually loses money on the subject tests. And, with about 4500 students per year taking the exam, you can quickly calculate that it’s far from millions of dollars.

While there, my physics abilities VASTLY improved. Things somehow clicked. I could solve problems better & faster than before. But I didn’t like my program. So with a better grasp of physics & more time to study, I tried to tackle the GRE again.

Though not quite as brutal, the exam did not go well. And I still don’t understand why. I was sure my skills had improved at least 4 fold (this is not an exaggeration, I’m underestimating here), and my scores improved and alotted me a meager 8 percentile over my last score.

Oh, and after all that, ETS managed to send out all of my old scores to my new schools (which I only found out about in March after having been waitlisted AGAIN). After about 10 hours of phone calls later, they agreed to send out the new scores free of charge, though it wasn’t a mistake on their parts. GAH.

I thank you, though, John, for your advice. Wish I had a resource like this (and the comments) when I took the exam years ago.

I will note at my undergraduate institution the majority of time students spend studying for the GRE is sitting down with a flashcard deck to memorize about 150 equations, which is the most logical thing to do if you’ve never been required to actually memorize the equations before. Put it this way, how many physicists could recite right NOW the differences between the moment of inertia between a disc, ring, sphere, hinge…