Monday, December 08, 2008

GRE Trend

There's an article in insidehighered.com that says "The number of students taking the Graduate Record Examination will decline in 2008, the first time ever that the GRE has seen a fall in test-taking during an economic downturn."

I wondered what google trends would show about searches for GRE. See below.

Interestingly, the number of searches has been averaging less and less over the years, despite the article's assertion that this was the first year they'd seen a drop in actual tests. I wondered if the results have some bias, and tested that by asking for statistics on searches for toys.
Nope--this seems as regular as a heartbeat, with a spike every holiday season. Searches for 'graduate school' have trended down, while searchs for 'jobs' have trended up. Steak seems to be trending down a bit, while potatoes are perhaps on the rise. Try 'wedding' and 'divorce'--Atlanta seems to be hard on marriages.
at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
  • Why the Student/Faculty Ratio is a Bad Metric
    The student/faculty ratio, which represents on average how many students there are for each faculty member, is a common metric of educationa...
  • The Well Intentioned Commissar
    (A parable for academic workers and those who direct their activities) by David W. Kammler, Professor Mathematics Department Southern Illino...
  • Why Discount Rates Only Go Up
    The annual NACUBO report on tuition discounts was covered in Inside Higher Ed back in April, including a figure showing historical rates. (...
  • A Canticle for Bloom*
    Introduction Stephen Jay Gould promoted the idea of non-overlaping magisteria , or ways of knowing the world that can be separated into mutu...
  • Bad Reliability, Part Two
    In the last article , I showed a numerical example of how to increase the accuracy of a test by splitting it in half and judging the sub-sco...
  • Problems with Rubric Data
    Introduction Within the world of educational assessment, rubrics play a large role in the attempt to turn student learning into numbers. ...
  • Assessment Institute 2023: Grades and Learning
    I'm scheduled to give a talk on grade statistics on Monday 10/26, reviewing the work in the lead article of JAIE's edition on grades...
  • EduPunk and the Matthew Effect
    Inside Higher Ed today has a piece on " The Rise of Edupunk ." I didn't find much new in the article, except that perhaps mai...
  • Average Four-Year Degree Program Size
    "How much data do you have?" is an inevitable question for program-level data analysis. For example, assessment reports that attem...
  • Teaching Critical Thinking
    I just came across a 2007 article by Daniel T. Willingham " Critical Thinking: Why is it so hard to teach? " Critical thinking is ...