<p>Lol how does this list correlate to an intelligent student body… at all!!!</p>
<p>Mark Perry of the University of Michigan posted data based on GRE scores broken down by discipline on the web (since removed). You can still find them on blogs such as vere loqui or Steve Sailer’s iSteve.com. The differences among majors is breathtaking.</p>
<p>Briefly, at the top you have physics, math, and computer science. At the bottom there are communication, education and public administration (28th and last). The highest ranking humanities is philosophy at 9th, then English at 15th. The highest social science is economics at 4th, then political science at 17th.</p>
<p>So, if you choose test scores as a proxy for intelligence, the OP makes sense. On the other hand, if athletic prowess is your thing, then I would guess the Beijing Institute of Physical Culture or something along that line…</p>
<p>^Even if that’s true, you can’t just compare the math students (which the results from the Putnam doesn’t even really do.) Assuming that the study you mentioned is true, that doesn’t account for the academic/intellectual abilities of the overall popluation. Instead, all it does is comparing the top students at school A to those at school B. Once again, that doesn’t necessarily give you a good idea on how A and B compare in the bigger picture.</p>
<p>AND, anyone who knows about the Putnam will agree (at least the ones I’ve met) that the results from those don’t reflect the intellect of the math majors at a particular school.</p>
<p>Ya I dont think that this is relevant at all. It just shows which schools actively recruit IMO Gold Medalists that are likely to do well in Putnam also.</p>
<p>Your objections are reasonable. The good thing is they are also testable.;)</p>
<p>You can simply compare the average SAT scores of schools that do well on the Putnam vs. ones that do not and see if there is any significant difference. If the OP’s assumptions are correct, I would expect elite schools like Caltech to score higher than other elites like Yale. Is that true?</p>
<p>I personally find it more informative to know about a person’s major than his alma mater, if I have choose between them. While I have come across students from elite schools that are not very sharp, I have yet to meet a student in theoretical physics that is dumb.</p>
<p>Got to go.</p>
<p>Anyone trying to read anything into this list should be aware of how teams are ranked in the Putnam. The school’s coordinator chooses the three-person team in advance. Once all the tests are graded, all students taking it are ranked. The team score is not the sum of the individual scores, but the sum of the ranks of the three students, lowest score winning. This method is widely considered to be completely insane, and it really hurts the credibility of the rankings. A year or two ago, for example, MIT had three of the top six students, and yet their team finished fourth because the “wrong” students were on it.</p>
<p>The effect is even worse because Putnam scores are notoriously inconsistent–I may do well one year and not so well the next, depending on how well the test plays to my strengths. A better measure of Putnam performance is probably the number of students a school places in the top N, where N is some number you pick. Under these metrics, MIT always finishes first, and Stanford and Princeton tend to be second and third in some order.</p>
<p>Of course, this doesn’t even begin to address the fact that Putnam performance may or may not be in any way correlated to the overall intelligence of the student body.</p>
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To an extent I agree with you here, but the Putnam is a singularly bad way of measuring this. Putnam winners are a tiny slice of a school’s math department, let alone the overall undergrad population. If we look at the data you mentioned at [Steve</a> Sailer’s iSteve Blog: Graduate Record Exam scores by graduate field of study](<a href=“http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/08/graduate-record-exam-scores-by-graduate.html]Steve”>Steve Sailer: iSteve: Graduate Record Exam scores by graduate field of study), we can see majors that tend to correlate with high GRE performance. It is easy to crunch the numbers and find schools with a high ratio of students in these majors. While tech schools obviously do well, other universities such as Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, Stanford, Harvard, and Dartmouth also excel.</p>
<p>Some will say that this metric favors quantitative reasoning over other talents. However, there are many majors in the humanities or social sciences that still have a high correlation with GRE scores. Philosophy, economics, religion, and English are just a few fine choices. The notable losers are quasi-majors such as communications (which I’ve never seen the point to anyway).</p>
<p>By the way, philosophy is actually second (or third), not ninth.</p>
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<p>On closer examination, this is Mark Perry’s graph:</p>
<p>[vere</a> loqui: What do GRE scores tell us about the competence of people in different professions?](<a href=“http://vereloqui.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-do-gre-scores-tell-us-about.html]vere”>Vital Remnants: What do GRE scores tell us about the competence of people in different professions?) </p>
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<p>I agree with you. If, however, we are looking for a proxy, it has not worked out badly.</p>
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<p>If quantitative reasoning give mathies an edge, does verbal reasoning not give wordsmiths an edge? If anything, I think the math portion is made too easy, making the gap among groups smaller than they really are, and I am speaking here as a social science grad.</p>
<p>Hey noimagination, the link you posted in your reply completely leaves out the Analytical portion of the GRE.</p>