PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Weissman, M. B.
TI  - Do GRE scores help predict getting a physics Ph.D.? A comment on a paper by Miller <em>et al.</em>
AID  - 10.1126/sciadv.aax3787
DP  - 2020 Jun 01
TA  - Science Advances
PG  - eaax3787
VI  - 6
IP  - 23
4099  - http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/23/eaax3787.short
4100  - http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/23/eaax3787.full
SO  - Sci Adv2020 Jun 01; 6
AB  - A recent paper in Science Advances by Miller et al. concludes that Graduate Record Examinations (GREs) do not help predict whether physics graduate students will get Ph.D.’s. Here, I argue that the presented analyses reflect collider-like stratification bias, variance inflation by collinearity and range restriction, omission of parts of a needed correlation matrix, a peculiar choice of null hypothesis on subsamples, blurring the distinction between failure to reject a null and accepting a null, and an unusual procedure that inflates the confidence intervals in a figure. Release of results of a model that leaves out stratification by the rank of the graduate program would fix many of the problems.