<p>Cobrat, by picking and choosing any college kid can figure out how to get a 3.8 GPA from a wide range of institutions (I’ll concede that MIT, CalTech, RPI and their ilk are notable exceptions). GPA is great when comparing apples to apples- Candidate A from U Michigan with a degree in Applied Math vs. Candidate B from UVA with a degree in Applied Math. I have reasonable confidence in the comparison.</p>
<p>Not everyone takes grad school admissions tests while in college- and the tests measure very different things. The GRE’s do not measure the high end of mathematical ability very well (i.e. it doesn’t take much to score at the upper end.) The LSAT’s don’t have a quant component at all- although they do measure logical reasoning and verbal skills, reading comprehension, etc. quite well. And you would be surprised (sarcasm here) how correlated SAT and GMAT’s are. I am not a statistician so don’t flame me… but even though the SAT is taken at age 17 and the GMAT 4 or more years later… I have rarely seen a kid who had average SAT scores end up at the high end of the GMAT. The kids who were 99 percentile scorers on the SAT’s are the kids with the same scores on the GMAT. </p>
<p>So sure, test away. And as I said- one datapoint only.</p>