Inside Graduate Admissions
insidehighered.com
insidehighered.com
> a heavy focus on the GRE
I've never heard of someone getting into a program based on GRE scores... bombing the GRE is certainly a red flag, but things like recommendation letters from big names are way more important.
Ok, 95%ile isn't a low score, but it's not like a "perfect" LSAT or MCAT score, which I believe indicates a 99.9%ile ranking.
This is important, because while 20 candidates with "perfect" math GRE scores definitely indicates a strong set of standardized test takers, it isn't comparable to perfect scores in other standardized exams.
I assume in humanities programs they give weight to the verbal/writing parts of the GRE just as a pre-filter before they examine candidates. But the quant part of the GRE is so basic (high school level, no calculus) that the difference between missing a single problem is the difference between 100 percentile and like 75 since almost everyone who is trying does unbelievably well.
I actually think you can miss few questions and still get an 800 on the general, with the "adaptive" computer test. Not sure about that though.
I've heard it has become a bit tougher these days, from my sister, due to a change in format.
I am depending entirely upon my undergraduate grades, publications, lab work, and recommendation letters, which are pretty darn good, so hopefully it works out.
“Grades are increasingly a lousy signal, especially at those elite places that just hand out the A’s. So you don't even have that anymore,”
“This is an elite university and a lot of the people at the university are elitists,” one professor said with a laugh. “So they make a lot of inferences about the quality of someone's work and their ability based on where they come from.”
I suffered a serious bias of the kind: "Well, this is Harvard, let's try a bit more to make sense out of it, maybe it's you that dont understand"
a 2013 article about Harvey Mansfield's war on grade inflation. What's funny is that Harvey Mansfield has been at war against grade inflation for at least 18 years, going back to his anti-Affirmative-Action debate (somehow, affirmative action caused grade inflation among the majority-white population of Harvard, according to Mansfield).
http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~lombardi/edudocs/mansfield_grade...
Back in the '90s, the going theory was that _Vietnam War_ created grade inflation, as schools gave out higher grades to help students get draft deferments. Of course, that was before GWBush taught us that you can draft-dodge just fine with C grades.
If you can't pull at lease a 75th percentile on your subject GRE, you probably shouldn't be trying to get a PhD in it.
Personally, I got >90th percentile with a bare minimum of studying. I wouldn't be surprised if most of my classmates at the time had the same.
Depends on your subject. The subject GRE for English lit, for example, is an incredible crapshoot: Much of it concerns passage identification, and if you happen to recognize that this one is from Billy Budd and this one is from Gulliver's Travels, great. If not, you can lose a lot of points in ways that are unlikely to reflect what lit profs are really judged by in the academic market: their ability to write peer-reviewed articles and books.
However, I had a college classmate who had mediocre GREs. This was not the problem for him that it might have been, since he picked his program based on climate (no more snow). He got his Ph.D. and has every since happily taught and published. He was very good at what he studied, but not at taking standardized tests.
Your system, has, built into its design, a requirement that for each PhD student, 3 others must try to get into a PhD program, to create a top 25 %ile.
You can find my e-mail on my profile. Feel free to shoot me any questions you have :)
Just one example b/C on mobile:
> For instance, those whose programs were not at the very top of the rankings frequently talked about not wanting to offer a spot to someone they believed would go to a higher-ranked program. They didn't want their department to be the graduate equivalent of what high school students applying to college term a safety school. In this sense many of these departments turned down superior candidates, some of whom might have enrolled. Many of the professors sound insecure about their programs even though they are among the very best
Grad school is not a job you can apply to through the year. All offers are made at the same time. If you make an offer to the best guys, what will happen is that when Harvard comes and scoops you , you will end up empty handed and had no students.
The reason is that most schools make an offer on e.g. say Feb and then there is an agreement to allow students to reply up to April 10th. So if your offers get turned down, you will have to scrap the bottom of the barrel.
Again, this article shows utter ignorance about grad school, stuff that just a call or email to any grad student could have answered. Also, sorry for sounding grumpy but I don't have a problem with people being wrong; I have a problem with being wrong and being an asshole about it