Patterns in international GRE scores

Why writing up my earlier post I stumbled onto to some interesting GRE data for applicants for various countries. I transcribed the results for all nations with sample sizes greater than 500. What you see above is a plot which shows mean quantitative and verbal scores on the GRE by nations.

The correlation in this set of countries between subtests of the GRE are as so:

Quant & verbal = 0.33

Verbal & writing = 0.84

Quant & writing = 0.21

Basically, the writing score and verbal score seem to reflect the lack of English fluency in many nations.

Many of these results are not too surprising if you’ve ever seen graduate school applications in the sciences (I have). Applicants from the United States tend to have lower quantitative and higher verbal scores. This is what you see here. It’s rather unfair since the test is administered in English, and that’s the native language of the United States. No surprise the United Kingdom and Canada score high on verbal reasoning. Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand didn’t have enough test takers to make the cut, but they all do as well as the United Kingdom. Singapore has an elite group which uses English as the medium of instruction in school.

I didn’t include standard deviation information, even though it’s in there. India has a pretty high standard deviation on quantitative reasoning, at 9.1. In contrast, China only has a standard deviation of 5.2 for quantitative reasoning. More than twice as many Indians as Chinese take the GRE.

Finally, I want to observe Saudi Arabia, as opposed to Iran. Both countries have about 5,000 people taking the GRE every year. About 2.5 times as many people live in Iran as opposed to Saudi Arabia. But the results for Saudi Arabia are dismal, while Iranian students perform rather well on the quantitative portion of the GRE.* This is not surprising to me, having seen applications from Saudi and Iranian students.

Saudi Arabia wants to move beyond being purely a resource-driven economy. These sorts of results show why many people are skeptical: in the generations since the oil-boom began the Saudi state has not cultivated and matured the human capital of its population. To get a better sense, here are the scores with N’s of MENA nations and a few others:

 The “natural break” is between the Saudis and everyone else. In recent years Saudis indigenized their non-essential workforce. I’m broadly skeptical of the consequences of this.

The data for the plot at the top is below the fold.

* I suspect the poor English language skills of Iranian students is partly a function of the nation’s isolation the past two generations, but that’s speculation on my part.