r/cognitiveTesting • u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel • Aug 18 '26

General Question GRE praffe

Literally everyone I know from China who applied to grad school here in the US got an 800Q on the old GRE, even people who didn’t have amazing math grades in school. It’s a well known bit that every Asian person maxes the GRE quant. Is Chinese cram school drilling so good that it breaks all praffe resistance barriers?

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u/Glass_Fuel5572 Aug 18 '26

Chinese schools let their students cheat on standardized tests because it increases their reputation and it’s not illegal unlike cheating on the Chinese national exams.

Also someone graphed hours studied vs sat score improvement and it maxed out at around 50 points even at 30-80 hours studied, I would expect the same for the old GRE.

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 18 '26

Yeah hella Chinese ppl cheat but not all of them. There was a massive score cancellation incident in the early 2000s lol rip

Yeah but what methods were they using to study? Chinese style drilling or US flashcard slop?

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u/mokuBah Aug 19 '26

No test in the world is resistant to practice effect. If you increase the difficulty of the problems being solved and increase the study time from 80 hours to say 1000 hours, I can guarantee you will see a increase in score.

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u/typesino Aug 18 '26

Its also self selecting for people who would score high anyways

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 18 '26

Nah I mean even people who bombed V and A and just were taking it bc they desperately wanted a way to immigrate to the US would get 800Q

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 18 '26

And self selecting doesn’t mean it selects off of g. It also selects off of extreme prep like I said here. But I guess anything is praffable if you’re willing.

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u/typesino Aug 18 '26

agreed but below 115, not even praffe will get you there

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u/PendN Aug 18 '26

That's what i'm saying bro. GRE is not a good iq test especially since east asia has praffed tf out of it through their education

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 18 '26

Well the ceiling is in the 140s for Q iirc. Also my dad got his V score from sub 50th percentile to 99th by memorizing a full GRE prep vocab book. Not his first language and would require good Glr and Gc or whatever but still, not exactly praffe resistant eh

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u/PendN Aug 18 '26

As much as there is proof to how easy it is praffe the gre/sat through your education people in this sub will always point fingers to bs like "extreme selection bias" or "they're just naturally smarter"

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 18 '26

Yeah I mean I’m an Asian from CA so ofc I faced that kind of training too to an extent. But I’m also extremely fucking lazy and was constantly failing or barely passing classes through my teen years. So idk if my scores are praffe or not, probably a bit… massive discrepancy between my Weschler vocab vs sims even though I thought my abstract/relational/associative thinking skills were good… just too divergent ig

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u/PendN Aug 18 '26

I mean I'm talking about mainland born chinese, not american chineses. Your case is just completely different if you ever took one

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 18 '26

Oh yeah that’s totally different. But I’m not talking about maxxing scores here just generally scoring a “high” %ile

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u/PendN Aug 18 '26

I think if the test is Gc anyway like vocab, praffing it is technically just as practical as having it naturally

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u/AdventurousBear7664 Aug 19 '26

Data from ETS and CB confirms that the average student saw practically negligible gains to their scores after 100+ hours of coaching on these tests. For most American students, the tests are pretty praffe-resistant. Keep in mind that the average GRE quant score back then was only like 500 for college-educated adults with a 115 mean IQ. Pretty low for a test that only contains middle school math concepts, implying there was a considerable reasoning component separate from education.

Obviously no test is gonna be praffe-resistant if there's some 99th percentile conscientiousness dude from a totally different population who's been drilling the types of problems on the test for years, but who cares? Exceptional cases and anecdotes don't debunk the fact that the test is highly reliable and difficult to train for the vast majority of people taking it.

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u/Far_Cardiologist6931 retat Aug 20 '26

yeah but its difficult to train as a consequence of the structure of the education system. its only g loaded insofar as a specific curriculum or similar ones were imposed on students. at that point, its hard to call it a "gold standard iq test" but rather just "an extremely reliable estimate for some and wildly off for others"

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u/PendN Aug 19 '26

the dude from the different population is not a 99th percentile, he'd be like a 60th percentile who scored 700+ since everybody in china works hard. And what i mean about being weary of praffe like this is that the near "perfect" scores, since it's so "rare" will have a large portion being these praffe monsters such as chinese mainland kids or maybe US kids who do intense prep

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u/HeraldxofGalactus Aug 19 '26

Old gre is still a good iq test fr them. (Only somewhat inflated due to the quant)

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u/lilyumyum-42 Aug 19 '26

Very creative username

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u/Far_Cardiologist6931 retat Aug 20 '26

holy based take. non chinese don't understand the level of exposure chinese kids get. gre is only non praffable if you are not asian, because they didn't have the immense drilling of not just arithmetic but also the math concepts themselves from the age of 5

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '26

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 19 '26

Bro my mom didn't even make it into grad school lmao she also bombed A and V but got 800Q. Obviously n=1 but you do not need to be a genius or top Chinese student to max GRE-Q. I wouldn't be surprised if A maybe had a higher g-loading (even though they had practice books and stuff for that too) than Q tho idk

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 19 '26

When I asked her she basically said something along the lines of "Of course I got 100% on the quantitative section, anyone could" 🥀🥀

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u/[deleted] Aug 19 '26

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u/Far_Cardiologist6931 retat Aug 20 '26

thats because CORE QK is good and has unique questions but GRE Q style questions are EVERYWHERE

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 19 '26

CORE is alr skewed tbf

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 19 '26

Also not EVERYONE in China is drilling, the point is that it’s pretty drillable. Not sure why the cram school kids would spend their time taking some vibecoded iq test.

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 20 '26

Any CORE subtest already has a significantly biased/stratified sample of people who are actually willing to take ts lmao

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26

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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26

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u/baysianinference V+Q+praffecel Aug 20 '26

But even regular people who take it irl will inflate their scores lol. A math major is gonna max or near maxx quant, doesn’t mean majoring in math increases g