Drop the GRE?

8 April 2010

The Got Medieval blog is advocating grad schools do just that. And as someone who has just gone through the sausage grinder that is grad school admissions, I couldn’t agree more. I can’t see how the GRE (Graduate Record Examination; the standardized test for admission into American graduate schools) has any relevance whatsoever to success in grad school, and Got Medieval tells you why.

I should note that the only school I got into was the one that doesn’t use the GRE at all (Toronto, being Canadian, doesn’t use the test), although my scores were within the range the schools said were acceptable and my verbal score totally rocked. My test prep was to go the Barnes and Noble route and buy some some books on the test rather than pay tutors; perhaps I should have forked over the $1,000 for a prep course. I don’t know whether or not the GRE played a factor in my case, but I suspect it did in at least some of the schools I applied to. I’m sure that I would perform (relatively) dismally on the new version of the test which combines verbal and math.

But then again, Ph.D. admissions are also highly personalized. One’s application must also fit with the research interests of one or more of the faculty. And not getting into any particular school doesn’t mean that you will not excel at another school. So there is no way of telling what factors played a part in any individual application.

There are no sour grapes on my part. Toronto was my first choice and I couldn’t be happier. (For personal reasons, staying in Berkeley would have been nice, but academically Toronto is where I want to be.)

Singh Vindicated

1 April 2010

Earlier I wrote about the libel case against author Simon Singh. The British Chiropractic Association sued him for libel when he called chiropractic treatments “bogus” in an article in the Guardian.

Today, the appeals court handed down its decision, vindicating Singh. Language Log has a summary of the decision.

The decision, which also includes a quotation from Milton (!), quotes a decision by the Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals, Underwager v Salter 22 Fed. 3d 730 (1994), that aptly sums up the conclusion:

[Plaintiffs] cannot, by simply filing suit and crying “character assassination!,” silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how adverse those views may be to plaintiffs’ interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation. […] More papers, more discussion, better data, and more satisfactory models—not larger awards of damages—mark the path towards superior understanding of the world around us.

Supersizing the Last Supper

28 March 2010

Okay, this has nothing to do with language or word origins, but it is an example of the pitfalls one can encounter when dipping your toes into areas about which you know little and why having a “Ph.D.” after your name doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what you’re talking about. And it’s about things medieval, which piques my fancy.

Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Applied Economics at Cornell University, and his brother Craig Wansink, a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College, have written an article on the growing size of food portions in depictions of Christ’s Last Supper over the centuries. Brian Wansink gives a summary in the Atlantic. Evidently, the Wansinks have determined that the relative size of the portions in artistic representations of the Last Supper have grown over the last 2,000 years and this has some sort of relevance to modern rates of obesity.

But Carl S. Pyrdum over at the Got Medieval blog does a fairly effective take down of how the Wansinks’ methodology is utterly wrong headed. The Wansinks really should have consulted someone with a smattering of knowledge of art history.

 Update: The Onion puts in its two cents..

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish)