I got accepted to Berkeley, and I had a score in the fifties. Not because I'm stupid, but as a foreigner, my vocabulary simply isn't big enough to get a good score on a test like this. I speak 7 languages well enough to be able to communicate with natives in their language, but I haven't read enough english books etcetc to train my vocabulary.
Ilya: I can easily explain everythng inside a "black box", but I don't need weird words to do that. I'm not saying my english is perfect, far from actually, but it is good enough for what I do! It's also good enough to write an award winning paper that got published.
Schools don't care about verbal scores - because they don't show your mastery of the language. Chinese people have HUGE vocabularies, larger than most americans/britons, but they can't say a sentence that makes sense. Analytical writing on the other hand counts, because THAT test shows your ability to communicate your message!!!