Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssdspoimdsjvv | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed reading your comment up until the last sentence where you mentioned your scores, which is completely irrelevant.

View on HN

Think it was just making the point he or she didn’t have any reason to cheat.

I'd be less surprised by a 99th percentiler cheating than a 90th percentiler. I know plenty of smart kids who enjoy gaming systems after all.

Your comment comes off as "people who score well on tests are more often cheaters", supported by anecdotal evidence. Above all, it's hardly relevant to the overall discussion and feels more like a grievance.

I read it that smart people are more likely to try and figure out to outsmart a security system not to cheat but just to see if they can.

In my experience at libraries and on college networks, that tracks.

Reading comprehension is still undefeated.

A student who has excess bandwidth after acing a test is more likely to want to poke and explore the limitations of that system than a student who, at capacity, is almost perfect.

Unscientific, but I'd bet there are two major cheating populations: 95%+, and something like 50-75%. By definition there are a lot more of the mid-tier-barely-getting-by cheaters, but they also aren't as smart and are only dangerous to societal trust in aggregate.

Come to think of it, I missed the third major population: pre-meds

A score of 14/100 on a test is unlikely to have cheated.

A score of 14/100 on a test is likely to have cheated incompetently, e.g. by using the answer key from some other test.

It's a suspicious claim as well, a perfect score on GRE math is only 94th percentile.

You're right. I misremembered. I went back to check the reports. I ended up with a perfect score in math (which is only 96th according to the score report and 1 point off on the reading section, which was 99th.

I only brought up the scores to indicate that I didn't need to cheat. I don't think GRE scores are a valid metric of competency or anything worth bragging about. I'm sorry it was taken in another way

How is this possible? Do you mean that the top 6% all get perfect scores and all get assigned 94th percentile, rather than 100th?

Anyway, this isn’t true in my experience. 167/170 in math got me 94th percentile. Far from a perfect score.

Yes the top 6% all got perfect scores. This happened to me on one of the optional SAT math exams, I was ironically confused for a bit.

Test needs to be harder

Maybe, maybe not. For this sort of test there is a huge selection bias since only people planning to work in math or an adjacent field bother to take the test. If you gave the same test to the general population this wouldn’t happen. I’m guessing most selective schools treat it as sort of a pass/fail, and I’m not sure whether that’s problematic for them or not.

It's definitely my recollection from the GRE (though this was many years ago now that I took it): for math a perfect score got you a percentile in the mid-to-high-90s, while on the opposite side you could lose several points and still be 99th percentile in verbal.

The percentile will vary by whatever the testing period is, since the percentile is the rank among other people taking the text within the same testing interval.

It could be relevant if the system itself is treating outlier performance as evidence of cheating.

Yes this whole comment seems just like an excuse to brag

I don't think anyone in their right mind brags about GRE scores, and I'm sorry it came off that way. I mentioned it solely because as other comments said, I have no reason to cheat.

I see it as a great example of the total failure of a system, where a top performer doesn't even have hope.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com