This week a table of average GRE scores for different academic disciplines has been circulating around the economic blogosphere. You can see it at Greg Mankiw’s blog here.
After a colleague pointed the chart out to me today, I decided that I would combine the GRE scores with self-identification scores of political correctness from another chart that made its way around my circle of friends a few months ago. Below you’ll find the resulting scatterplot and regression line.
The correlation coefficient in the chart is -0.63, indicating a noticeable decline in GRE performance as one transitions to groups that are more PC. You can figure out the implications of that statement for yourself.
“You can figure out the implications of that statement for yourself.”
Clearly a clever ploy to make sure than only people who are not politically correct will be able to figure out what you are getting at.
Politically correct people won’t have the required GRE to interpret all those numbers and data points!
Genius.
But of course it’s genius. I routinely assume in my day to day life that the people who score below 1600 on the GRE are incapable of any abstract thought. Really, it’s hard to imagine that a person whose GRE score is below 1400 can even see five inches in front of them, let alone interpret a scatterplot — plainly the most complex of all graphs.
Putting aside all facetiousness or flippancy, I think finding the proper interpretation of this correlation is just not that simple. It’s especially difficult because looking back now at the quick statistical hack the graph represents makes me wonder even more strongly what it really means: after all, how can one score above 1600 on a test whose top score was 1600 when I took it?