Analogies in Admission Exams: The Hidden Language of Verbal Reasoning
Analogies in Admission Exams:
The Hidden Language of Verbal Reasoning
A deep academic analysis of analogies in admission exams as cognitive, cultural, and social devices of educational assessment.
Introduction: when an apparently simple exercise determines life trajectories
Analogies occupy a central place in many admission exams for higher and upper-secondary education. Presented as verbal reasoning exercises designed to assess general cognitive abilities, they are often perceived as technical, neutral test items devoid of ideological content. However, this perception is profoundly misleading. Analogies constitute far more than a linguistic challenge: they are institutionalized cognitive artifacts that condense historical assumptions about intelligence, merit, language, and educational legitimacy.
From a critical perspective, analogies function as a hidden language within academic selection systems. Hidden not because they are intrinsically inaccessible, but because they render invisible the social, cultural, and educational conditions that make their comprehension possible. Once an abstract relationship between words becomes a criterion for educational inclusion or exclusion, it ceases to be a mere intellectual exercise and begins to operate as a device of power.
This article offers an exhaustive analysis of analogies in admission exams from an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates cognitive psychology, linguistics, sociology of education, and critical studies of assessment. Rather than focusing solely on how analogies are solved, it examines what they actually evaluate, why they are considered legitimate indicators of aptitude, whom they structurally benefit, and what effects they produce on educational inequality and student subjectivity, with particular attention to the Latin American and Mexican contexts.
Analogy as a fundamental cognitive process
From the standpoint of cognitive psychology, analogical reasoning is recognized as one of the core capacities of human thought. It consists of establishing structural correspondences between two distinct domains, identifying abstract relations that transcend superficial similarities. This ability enables individuals to transfer prior knowledge to novel situations, construct scientific explanations, comprehend complex metaphors, and solve non-routine problems.
Classic research—particularly that developed by Dedre Gentner—has demonstrated that analogical reasoning operates through what she terms structure mapping: a process by which individuals align relational structures across domains, prioritizing deep relational correspondence over literal similarity. This form of reasoning requires a high degree of abstraction and cognitive control, as it demands the inhibition of irrelevant associations and sustained attention to underlying relations.
From this perspective, it is understandable that analogies have long been regarded as privileged indicators of fluid intelligence. Nevertheless, while this association is empirically supported in certain experimental contexts, it becomes problematic when transferred without mediation to large-scale, high-stakes assessment scenarios.
From mental ability to cognitive technology
To understand the role of analogies in admission exams, it is necessary to move beyond a purely psychological view and adopt a sociohistorical lens. Analogies, as they appear in exams, are not spontaneous expressions of human reasoning but cognitive technologies: socially designed forms intended to capture, standardize, and compare mental processes.
Cognitive technologies transform complex mental activities into discrete, measurable, and rankable units. In the case of analogies, this transformation takes a highly formalized form: A is to B as C is to D. This structure does not emerge naturally from everyday thinking; rather, it responds to institutional demands for efficiency, objectivity, and comparability.
This point is crucial: once a cognitive capacity is converted into an evaluative technology, it ceases to be neutral. It becomes embedded in power relations, selection mechanisms, and regimes of merit legitimation.
The history of analogies in assessment: psychometrics, modernity, and social control
The systematic use of analogies in admission testing consolidated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside the emergence of modern psychometrics. This historical period was marked by profound social transformations: the expansion of educational systems, industrialization, urbanization, and the need to manage increasingly large populations.
Within this context, educational institutions faced a central dilemma: how to select students in a “fair” and “objective” manner in the absence of personal ties or explicit aristocratic criteria. Psychometrics offered a technical solution to a fundamentally political problem. Analogies, together with other verbal and mathematical reasoning items, were incorporated into aptitude tests under the promise of measuring general abilities independent of social origin.
Historical research has shown, however, that these tests were from their inception shaped by normative conceptions of intelligence, normality, and social value. In some cases, they were even linked to eugenic and hierarchical projects that are now widely discredited.
Language, cognition, and social structure
Verbal analogies cannot be understood apart from the language through which they operate. Solving an analogy involves far more than recognizing an abstract logical relation; it requires mastery of meanings, semantic nuances, metaphorical uses, and culturally specific conventions of language.
From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, language is not merely an instrument of expression but a structure that organizes experience and thought. Consequently, verbal analogies simultaneously assess cognitive capacities and linguistically mediated competencies that are unevenly distributed across social groups.
This insight is fundamental for understanding why students with unequal educational trajectories encounter systematic difficulties with these items. The issue is not intellectual deficiency, but unequal access to linguistic practices valued by the evaluative system.
Cultural capital and symbolic violence
Pierre Bourdieu’s work provides a particularly powerful theoretical framework for analyzing the role of analogies in admission exams. The concept of cultural capital helps explain how certain cognitive and linguistic dispositions are unevenly acquired and subsequently transformed into legitimate criteria of evaluation.
Analogies privilege those who have been socialized in environments where abstract language, analytical reading, and formal argumentation are habitual practices. For these students, the exam format feels familiar; for others, it represents an opaque code whose logic has never been made explicit.
This process constitutes a form of symbolic violence: the educational system imposes a particular cultural criterion as if it were universal and natural, attributing failure to individual deficiencies rather than recognizing structural inequalities.
What do analogies actually assess?
Official discourse presents analogies as indicators of abstract reasoning and general intelligence. While empirical evidence supports correlations between performance on analogies and certain cognitive functions—such as working memory and executive control—these correlations do not exhaust the phenomenon.
Performance on analogies also depends on factors such as:
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breadth and depth of vocabulary,
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familiarity with standardized test formats,
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prior training,
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management of anxiety and time pressure.
This reveals a central tension: analogies do not measure a single dimension, but a complex combination of cognitive skills, cultural resources, and emotional dispositions.
The student’s subjective experience: anxiety, estrangement, and self-attribution of failure
A frequently overlooked aspect of technical analyses of analogies is their impact on students’ subjective experience. For many applicants—especially those from marginalized educational contexts—these items generate a deep sense of estrangement: “I understand the words, but I don’t understand what is being asked of me.”
This estrangement is not trivial. It has significant emotional and symbolic consequences: it increases anxiety, erodes cognitive confidence, and encourages the internalization of failure as personal incapacity. From a critical psychological perspective, this process can be understood as a structurally induced form of self-attribution.
Analogies thus do not merely select; they produce subjectivities, shaping who comes to see themselves as “fit” or “unfit” for higher education.
The Mexican case: analogies, assessment, and structural inequality
In Mexico, admission exams that include analogies operate within a profoundly unequal educational system. The gap between private urban schools and rural or marginalized public schools translates into significant differences in exposure to academic language and abstract reasoning.
In this context, analogies tend to amplify preexisting inequalities—not because students lack capacity, but because the system evaluates competencies that have not been equitably developed.
Trainability and the crisis of neutrality
The proliferation of test-preparation courses challenges the presumed neutrality of analogies. Evidence shows that performance improves significantly with targeted training, revealing that these tests assess trainable skills rather than innate aptitudes.
Because access to high-quality preparation is socially stratified, analogies reinforce dynamics of privilege under the guise of meritocracy.
The contemporary crisis of the analogy paradigm in educational assessment
In recent decades, the use of analogies as a central evaluative instrument in admission exams has entered a phase of profound questioning. This critique is not a passing pedagogical trend, but the result of sustained empirical, theoretical, and ethical challenges from multiple fields. Cognitive psychologists, sociologists of education, public policy experts, and student movements have all pointed to the structural limitations of such items.
One central axis of critique concerns predictive validity. While analogical performance was long assumed to predict future academic success, more recent studies suggest that such prediction is, at best, moderate and highly context-dependent. In many cases, prior academic performance is an equally strong or stronger predictor than decontextualized verbal reasoning tests.
This critique leads to a deeper question: even if analogies predict a certain kind of academic success, what kind of success is that, and under what conception of higher education? This question exposes a fundamental tension between a selective, classificatory model of the university and one oriented toward inclusion, critical formation, and epistemic diversity.
Analogies, power, and educational legitimacy
From a social sciences perspective, analogies can be analyzed as devices of institutional legitimation. They do not merely select students; they legitimize the authority of the educational system to decide who deserves access to scarce opportunities. This legitimacy rests on a powerful narrative: the idea that selection is based on objective, measurable individual capacities.
This narrative weakens when the real conditions underlying performance on analogies are examined. Unequal access to cultural capital, test trainability, and dependence on academic language erode the claim of neutrality. In this sense, analogies function as what Michel Foucault would call a technology of government: a mechanism that regulates populations through ostensibly technical but deeply normative criteria.
The human impact of this process is significant. Each year, millions of students experience institutional rejection through admission exams. This rejection is not abstract; it translates into truncated educational trajectories, symbolic grief, reconfigured life expectations, and, in some cases, persistent exclusion from formal education. Assessment thus becomes a biographical turning point rather than a neutral procedure.
Historical memory, mythification, and the persistence of the model
One factor explaining the persistence of analogies in admission systems is their historical naturalization. Over time, these items cease to be perceived as contingent technical decisions and become “traditional” elements of the exam. This tradition creates an illusion of inevitability: it is assumed that analogies have always been there and therefore must remain.
This mythification of evaluative instruments hinders critique. Analogies are presented as part of educational “common sense,” even though their use responds to specific historical contexts that have changed dramatically. Breaking this inertia requires not only empirical evidence, but political will and institutional imagination.
Contemporary alternatives to analogy-based assessment
Questioning the analogy paradigm does not entail abandoning rigorous assessment, but opening the door to more complex and contextualized models. Various educational systems have explored alternatives aimed at balancing academic rigor and social justice.
These include situated assessments that present contextualized problems and allow observation of how students mobilize knowledge in meaningful scenarios. Other models combine multiple criteria: prior academic performance, academic portfolios, structured interviews, and non-exclusionary diagnostic tests.
These approaches share a fundamental premise: intelligence and academic potential do not manifest in a single form and cannot be fully captured by a single test format.
The debate in Latin America and Mexico: structural challenges
In Latin America—and particularly in Mexico—the debate over analogies in admission exams carries specific urgency due to the scale of educational inequality. In contexts where schooling reproduces deep regional, linguistic, and socioeconomic divides, the use of high-stakes standardized testing poses unavoidable ethical dilemmas.
The persistence of analogies in such contexts should be analyzed not merely as a technical choice, but as a political decision that shapes the profile of the university student body. Maintaining these instruments without substantive modification implies accepting that access to higher education will continue to be mediated by unresolved structural inequalities.
Lessons for the present: rethinking the “hidden language”
Understanding analogies as a hidden language shifts the debate from the technical realm to the political and ethical one. The issue is not simply improving item wording or expanding test-preparation programs, but interrogating the assumptions that sustain selective assessment itself.
Rethinking analogies requires asking what kind of university society seeks to build, which forms of knowledge are valued, and what responsibilities institutions assume in the face of social inequality. These questions have no simple answers, but ignoring them perpetuates a selection model that confuses technical neutrality with justice.
Analogies in admission exams are far more than verbal reasoning exercises. They are cognitive, cultural, and institutional devices that articulate ideas about intelligence, merit, and social value. Their apparent simplicity conceals a complex network of historical, linguistic, and political assumptions that decisively shape the educational trajectories of millions.
Critically analyzing them allows us to understand how assessment systems can reproduce inequality even when presented as objective instruments. Making their language visible does not mean discarding them unreflectively, but subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny that reveals their limits and effects.
If higher education aspires to be a space of critical formation, inclusion, and diversity, it is indispensable to reassess the role that instruments such as analogies play within the architecture of academic selection. Only then will it be possible to move toward evaluation models that do not confuse intelligence with privilege nor merit with cultural familiarity.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1997). Cultural capital, schooling, and social space. Siglo XXI Editores.
Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7(2), 155–170.
Gentner, D., Holyoak, K. J., & Kokinov, B. N. (Eds.). (2001). The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science. MIT Press.
Messick, S. (1989). Validity. In R. L. Linn (Ed.), Educational Measurement (3rd ed.). Macmillan.
Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4–14.
Snow, R. E., Kyllonen, P. C., & Marshalek, B. (1984). The topography of ability and learning correlations. Advances in the Psychology of Human Intelligence, 2.
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