The SAT, SSAT, GRE, MCAT, LSAT and GMAT are all glorified IQ tests. They’re used for entrance to selective colleges and graduate programmes. Lots of people will be quite happy to tell you where they went to school and what they studied which is the non-vulgar way of signalling your IQ.
Intelligence:Knowns and Unknowns
> are used for many purposes, such as selection, diagnosis, and evaluation. Many of the most widely used tests are not intended to measure intelligence itself but some closely related construct: scholastic aptitude, school achievement, specific abilities, etc. Such tests are es- pecially important for selection purposes. For preparatory school, it's the SSAT; for college, the SAT or ACT; for graduate school, the GRE; for medical school, the MCAT; for law school, the LSAT; for business school, the GMAT. Scores on intelligence-related tests matter, and the stakes can be high.
I scored very well on the GMAT and it’s really testing how diligently you prepare for it, and that is the predictor of success, not the content of the test itself, IMHO.
I’m sure you did improve. Practice effects exist. They’re also limited. Just as I will get faster if I train to run the 100m or run a marathon you can get better at the GMAT, LSAT etc. But there’s a plateau you hit where you can’t get better. If you try to take someone from 50th percentile to 99th on the GMAT in the majority of cases you will fail. An increase of 0.26 standard deviations isn’t nothing but on the GMAT it’s only ~30 points.
Retesting in selection: a meta-analysis of coaching and practice effects for tests of cognitive ability.
Previous studies have indicated that as many as 25% to 50% of applicants in organizational and educational settings are retested with measures of cognitive ability. Researchers have shown that practice effects are found across measurement occasions such that scores improve when these applicants retest. In this study, the authors used meta-analysis to summarize the results of 50 studies of practice effects for tests of cognitive ability. Results from 107 samples and 134,436 participants revealed an adjusted overall effect size of 0.26. Moderator analyses indicated that effects were larger when practice was accompanied by test coaching and when identical forms were used. Additional research is needed to understand the impact of retesting on the validity inferences drawn from test scores.
Yes and no. You can certainly practice GMAT style questions directly and get better at them that way, but the real trick is to meta up a level and see that they follow a pattern, at which point getting a very good score is easy. I think the test is really testing for that (I guess deliberately or why put the pattern in in the first place?). Or maybe it is really testing for the personality type that likes to prepare in advance rather than winging it, that would obviously correlate well with success in any field.
Intelligence:Knowns and Unknowns
> are used for many purposes, such as selection, diagnosis, and evaluation. Many of the most widely used tests are not intended to measure intelligence itself but some closely related construct: scholastic aptitude, school achievement, specific abilities, etc. Such tests are es- pecially important for selection purposes. For preparatory school, it's the SSAT; for college, the SAT or ACT; for graduate school, the GRE; for medical school, the MCAT; for law school, the LSAT; for business school, the GMAT. Scores on intelligence-related tests matter, and the stakes can be high.
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