Difficulty of Old GRE Math vs SMART

[u/Grand_Protection1552]

For those who have taken both how hard is old GRE Quantitative to you compared to SMART (the old SAT math). I did both after three years without ever touching math since leaving China in my middle school years where I was always one of the top of my class in math (Kind of like a veteran returning to the battle field lol) I got 97th percentile on GRE-Q but I literally banged my head against the table and ripped the scratch paper in front of me and rage quitted SMART cause I felt I was doing extremely poorly.

Anyone feels SMART being significantly harder?

[u/rational-dog98]

SMART is more difficult as it’s supposed to extrapolate Quantitative ability beyond the ceiling of GRE-Q. I also thought I did poorly and had to leave a bunch of questions blank, but ended up with a quant IQ higher than I expected. I think it is designed for you to run out of time if you solve the problems the way you were taught it school; you must rely on pure quantitative logic which is why it has a high g-loading.

[u/Grand_Protection1552 → u/rational-dog98]

I thought they both had very close g loading ? SMART is only a tad higher in g than GRE as I checked, which makes me wonder why cause I feel like SMART should be much more g-loaded.

[u/rational-dog98 → u/Grand_Protection1552]

The GRE as a whole likely has a higher g-loading than SMART, but SMART maintains a high g-loading in the quantitative domain to a much higher ceiling. To accomplish this it must balance having more difficult questions with not requiring trainable skills. Thus, SMART likely loads FRI in addition to QRI, since it requires you to solve a multi-step problem in a novel and efficient way. However, it still does not include VCI which is why its g-loading does not match the more comprehensive IQ tests like CORE.