Some college graduates are looking to improve their chances of getting hired in a tough job market by offering up an unusual credential: their scores on the Graduate Record Examination.
The standardized test also appears to be of increasing interest to employers, some of whom are using GRE scores to help them sort large numbers of applicants for scarce jobs.
The off-label use of the test, which was designed to assist in graduate-school admissions decisions, arises as critics question whether a college degree means as much as it once did. Grade inflation also has cast doubt on the value of using the grade-point average as a marker of a graduate’s knowledge. And one student in three attends more than one college before he or she graduates, making it difficult for employers to rely on the reputation of a single institution for judging the rigor of an applicant’s education.
The use of GRE scores in the job market may also reflect the current craze to quantify things that, like a person’s potential, can be hard to measure.
“You’d like a fair way to evaluate,” said David G. Payne, vice president and chief operating officer in the higher-education division of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE. “Standardized tests allow you to do that.”
Over time, ETS got anecdotal reports that some businesses considered standardized-test scores in their hiring decisions, Mr. Payne said. Officials of the testing service have heard such reports more frequently in the past two years, with candidates and employers particularly interested in the general test of the GRE. The test has three sections: writing, verbal reasoning, and quantitative reasoning.
ETS’s market researchers last April surveyed 317 human-resources directors at companies of different sizes. About 25 percent reported requiring, recommending, or accepting GRE scores when evaluating candidates. The test was used most commonly to sort candidates in the initial screening of résumés. Large companies and those specializing in computer software and financial services were most likely to use GRE scores, according to the survey. Nearly 40 percent of businesses with 10,000 or more employees considered their applicants’ GRE scores.
Job candidates themselves also reported high interest in using their GRE scores, the market researchers found. Of recent graduates recruited in 2011 by the companies that participated in the survey, about one in four had submitted his or her GRE score.
The data persuaded ETS to begin a three-year pilot project in December to make official GRE scores available to businesses, with the consent of test takers. In the past, the only way a business could learn how a job applicant had performed on the test was to request the scores from the applicant or read them on a résumé.
Test takers can have their scores sent to a company for the standard fee of $25. ETS will not market the scores to businesses, the way that testing companies typically do with colleges, Mr. Payne said. The chief purpose of the project is to open a channel from ETS to employers, allowing the testing service to study how valid GRE scores may be as a predictor of a job applicant’s success in the workplace.
The businesses that receive official scores from ETS through the pilot project will determine the standards for measuring the success of their employees, which will then be compared with the employees’ performance on the GRE.
An Added Measure
Sean P. Murphy, a data scientist at the Johns Hopkins University’s applied-physics laboratory, put his GRE scores on his résumé in 2011. He did so to get work with a test-preparation company that required a stellar GRE performance (he scored in the 99th percentile).
Even though he holds degrees from prominent institutions—he has two master’s degrees, one in biomedical engineering from Hopkins and one in business administration from the University of Oxford—he has kept the scores on his résumé as an added measure of his abilities.
The GRE, Mr. Murphy said, “is a surrogate, probably a poor surrogate, for answering the question, ‘Can you solve the problems I want you to solve?’”
Many employers would like to be able to give a job candidate a trial run of a month or so to see how he or she handles a project, Mr. Murphy said, but that is impractical. Using a tool like the GRE score, he added, is more meritocratic than hiring largely on the basis of institutional reputation.
“There’s no accurate, objective, unbiased measurement of how people perform in getting something done in a complex environment like a company, with lots of moving parts and lots of social dynamics,” Mr. Murphy said. “What measurement do we have?”
Erin Bodine, an account director for Development Counsellors International, took the GRE in 2001 before applying to a graduate program in journalism. On the writing portion of the test, she scored a perfect six, which she put on her résumé.
“I thought that people who knew the GRE would see six out of six and would understand that I was good writer,” she said. “That wasn’t me saying it; it was, hopefully, an objective test.”
Ms. Bodine isn’t sure, though, whether any potential employers gave much credence to the score. She landed her first job by networking with a woman who was a partner at the agency that eventually hired her.
Among businesses that explicitly ask for scores on various standardized tests, it is not clear how heavily they rely on them. Capital One and Bain and Company, for example, request such scores, including the GRE, from graduates applying for jobs like data analyst or associate consultant. But Capital One said such scores were not part of its typical recruiting practice.
Goldman Sachs considers standardized-test scores in its overall evaluation of job applicants. “While recruiters may consider any test scores provided,” a spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail, “the interview process and relevant experience are two of the more important factors in determining whether a candidate would be successful.”
‘Troubling’ Use
Some higher-education researchers were amused, and others appalled, to learn that GRE scores are being used in the job market.
“It struck me as pretty much out of left field,” said Sherry F. Queener, a professor of pharmacology at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and associate dean of the graduate school at Indiana. “Most of us look at the GRE score as, at best, predicting the first-year GPA.”
Other scholars, like William E. Sedlacek, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Maryland at College Park, said businesses would be ill served using GRE scores to screen candidates.
Only a subset of college students who may apply to graduate school take the GRE. Thus the test tends to represent a narrow segment of high-ability students, he said, in contrast to the SAT, which is taken by a far larger sample of the population.
Mr. Sedlacek and other researchers said businesses would be better off focusing on candidates’ noncognitive characteristics, like resilience, creativity, and the ability to take directions, learn on the fly, and work in teams.
“What you probably want is a range of different abilities,” he said. “For example, how do you work the system and handle obstacles to your development? You need that ability, and that’s different than what the GRE tests.”
The GRE could offer some value as “a reliable indicator of general smarts,” as long as employers are wary in using the scores, said Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.
“It’s not a ridiculous idea,” he said, although “an employer would be pretty dumb to rely on this heavily.”
Employers that seem to value GRE scores most heavily are in the banking and financial sector, according to ETS. That suggests that the quantitative-reasoning part of the test may be what some companies find most valuable, said Philip D. Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University.
Business’s growing interest in information and big-data analysis will make math and statistics ability increasingly important in job candidates, he said. “I suspect that there are some jobs that require very high math ability,” he wrote in an e-mail, “and this might be a way that some employers think they can get at it.”
The lack of research linking GRE to workplace performance, though, is “troubling,” Mr. Gardner added.
Robert J. Sternberg, provost of Oklahoma State University, has a more scathing view, particularly of test takers who offer their GRE scores to potential employers.
Doing so, he said, suggests that such applicants prize narrow aptitudes over traits like hard work, dedication, and a sense of responsibility.
“I hire people all the time,” Mr. Sternberg said in an e-mail. “If someone included his or her GRE scores on a job application, I would find the information highly useful. I definitely would not hire the individual.”
