Nicholas Kristofs article. I found his claims really strange: that Americans value knowledge in humanities more than math or science (hello? Not in my corner of the universe. He cites Plato's cave in particular. What rarefied atmosphere does he breathe?). He also noted admiringly that Chinese students had to take the GRE b/c the SAT wasn't available, explaining that the GRE is for graduate students, the implication being that it's tremendously more difficult than the SAT and a good showing is that much more impressive.

I teach the GRE and I've taken it myself. The paper and pencil version, which is what these students would be taking, is not more difficult than the SAT, nor does it test different concepts (with the exception of one or two questions on statistics, which are extremely basic). The workbook I use with my GRE students uses many of the same questions I use with my SAT students (as I found to my frustration when I tried to find some tricky geometry problems for my high-scoring SAT students and combed the GRE book for them. Nope, same problems as in the SAT book). I actually scored ten points *higher* on the Quantitative GRE than I did on the Math section of my SAT, after a happy six-year hiatus from taking any math classes whatsoever.