I've never put much faith in standardized testing of any sort but if you want an example of being good in one thing and a disaster in another you should have seem my first GMAT results. I think I scored 640 or something acceptable - not quite good enough to get into the really top schools but good enough to get in somewhere, it's how the results were split that was funny. I was in the top 97'th percentile in terms of language and logic, and in the bottom 6'th percentile in the maths. So I took a prep course with a view to retaking the test. That got my math scores up to the 50'th percentile and my overal score up to 720 which combined with some really good and selectively chossen reference letters from major donors to the school got me into my first choice school. But when I got accepted and got my acceptance package they included a note saying they'd never seen a GMAT score so widely split between verbal and mathematical ability (lucky they didn't see the first score) and strongly suggested I take a math's refresher before the semester started. I didn't instead I made friends with an engineer who couldn't write to save his life, and I helped him write his essays, and he helped me with the math enough to graduate with a finance degree. Today I'm a designated accountant and I basically do math all day.

I was most definitely annoyed to learn that my high school algebra teacher was right, and that you do use algebra in the real world

---splitimage