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Are some schools using undisclosed GRE cut-offs in admissions decisions?

Brian Leiter

An undergraduate student writes:

There appears to be many philosophy graduate school departments that have unannounced GRE cutoffs at a verbal score of 700. All of the applications with verbal scores lower than 700 do not make it past the initial, most basic stage of review. I have spoken with a Director of Graduate Studies who somewhat embarrassingly admitted this to me. I have spoken with one of my undergraduate professors who asked around and was told the exact same thing. And I’ve discoursed with prospective students and current grad students about this issue on a Live Journal website, “Who Got In.” The two professors claim that there is indeed a cutoff, while many of the students think otherwise. They usually point to an example, a “friend” or third cousin twice removed, “who got in” with sub-600 verbal scores. But when I do a little poking around it turns out that such individuals typically have extenuating circumstances – a Master's Degree in hand, they were undergrads at the grad department they were accepted to, one of their UG professors was on the Yale Row Team with the DGS, and so forth. Of course, the students like to think that it’s their “brilliant” writing samples that overcame their poor GRE scores. 

It seems, however, that if a student has poor GRE scores, his or her writing sample and other materials do not get a full review. All the while, I have not seen a single GRE cutoff score posted on any of the graduate schools’ websites. If there is, in fact, cutoffs (as I have been told there are by a professor and a DGS), then the institutions need to post them on their applications or websites. The average cost for an application is around $73 ($50 for app; $23 to send the GREs). I applied to 13 schools.  This was a substantial financial burden for me: all told, I spent around $1200 on applications and related materials. This is a financial burden I am willing to suffer if and only if my application receives a complete and thorough review.  

I hate to make accusations on insufficient evidence, but it seems as if some institutions take undue pride in the prodigious number of applications they receive – “we received 350 applications last year.” It also seems that such numbers are inflated, especially in light of the untold GRE cutoff standards. Are 350 writing samples, letters of recommendation (times 3), and statements of purpose being read? Unfortunately, I do not think they are. I’m afraid that a large portion of those application are being set aside on the very first session that the graduate committee meets, never to be looked at again because of GRE verbal scores that do not live up to a standard in which the applicants know absolutely nothing about. 

If this is not happening, I have been told wrong or made an inference from insufficient information. If it is happening, there needs to be transparency about the school’s cutoff score for the GRE (and perhaps refunds to the student that did not get a fair shake?). 

Comments from readers, including faculty involved in admissions?  My own sense is that it may be very hard to disentangle weak GRE scores as an indicator of a weak application from a GRE "cut-off."  Even my correspondent acknowledges that there are reports of students admitted with low GRE scores, though he claims extentuating circumstances would explain those.  Signed comments will be preferred; all comments must include a valid e-mail address.

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50 responses to “Are some schools using undisclosed GRE cut-offs in admissions decisions?”

  1. Ned Hall

    No such cutoff is employed at Harvard. At most, if an application makes it through to one of the later rounds (which will *always* be on the strength of its other elements), and one of the GRE scores is unusually low, that fact will simply prompt closer scrutiny of the rest of the file. It's also possible that — again, at a later stage — an unusually low GRE could be used as a tie-breaker, though I've yet to see this happen.

    Reply
  2. L.A. Paul

    I am the director of graduate admissions for UNC's philosophy program. I review every single application we receive. There is no GRE cutoff. However, an applicant with low GRE scores needs to compensate, for example, by having high grades in philosophy courses and strong letters of recommendation, and ultimately by submitting a strong writing sample. Often, those with low GREs also have weak letters and low grades, and such applicants rarely make it past the first cut.

    Reply
  3. Carolyn Suchy-Dicey

    If true, this news is disappointing, since:

    1. I would have thought the Analytical Writing section more relevant to philosophy programs;
    2. Top English departments claim to take students from 680-up (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/english/grad_applications.htm), so 700 seems unnecessarily high as a cut-off for philosophy; and
    3. The GRE seems to be a test of basic skills and thus not fine-grained enough to capture someone's grasp of and potential for a discipline like philosophy,

    such that this reliance on GRE scores appears to be a substitution of precision for accuracy, which is no substitute at all.

    Reply
  4. Eric Schwitzgebel

    In my experience as a sporadic member of the admissions committee at U.C. Riverside, there is no GRE score cutoff. Different committee members have different attitudes toward the value of the GRE as an indicator, and because of the fluctuating composition of the committee, GRE performance tends to be weighted differently year to year.

    I will breeze quickly over some applications if they don't seem plausible from the start, but for me that initial sense of plausibility has mostly to do with grades in upper-division philosophy courses and almost nothing to do with GRE. Still, I will at least skim through the statement, letters, and sample of even weak-seeming applications, ready to catch an unusual situation or a diamond in the rough. Every application is reviewed by at least two committee members, and any member can make a case for any applicant whom they think shows promise.

    Reply
  5. Tim O'Keefe

    No GRE cutoff at GSU either. Having such a cutoff would be incredibly stupid, as performance in past philosophy courses and the quality of one's writing sample are much better predictors than one's GRE scores of how well one will do in a philosophy graduate program.

    On a somewhat related note, I'm hoping that ETS's odd decision to switch over to a 130 – 170 score scale will prompt departments to rely less on GREs.

    Reply
  6. Eli Weber

    As someone with slightly lower than desirable GRE scores, I find these initial responses immensely troubling. They in effect state that if you have low GRE scores, the rest of your file must be better than it otherwise would need to be, and that it will be scrutinized more closely in virtue of your low GRE scores. Even if this is not a "cut-off" in the sense described, what justifies such a practice? The relevance of the GRE to success in philosophy has been openly questioned for some time, to the point that very good programs like Cornell and MIT do not even require it. Why on earth does a low GRE score entail that the applicant must do comparatively better in other areas, and in the face of more careful scrutiny? I fail to see the connection. If applicant A has a slightly better writing sample, grades in philosophy, and recommendations than applicant B, but applicant B has significantly higher GRE scores, isn't applicant A still clearly a better candidate? Wouldn't we say that in such a case, B's better GRE scores are just irrelevant?

    Reply
  7. Jamie Tappenden

    I'm director of admissions at Michigan. We don't use GRE scores in the way this posting describes. Like Laurie at UNC, I review every application personally and the GRE alone, if accompanied by an otherwise solid dossier, never provides grounds for excluding an application. We regard the GREs as a genuine piece of information, but as much less useful information than grades, letters and the written sample.

    Reply
  8. David Danks

    I am DGS for Carnegie Mellon, and have the same response as Laurie & Ned. We have no GRE cutoffs (for Math, Verbal, or Analytic); every file is read by at least three people. But if an applicant has a low score, then there usually does need to be compensation elsewhere in the application.

    I think that part of the problem is that low GRE scores tend to be reasonably (though of course, not perfectly) correlated with GPA, quality of writing sample, quality of undergraduate school, etc. As a result, it can easily look like there is a cutoff, since very few people are admitted with scores below, e.g., 700 Verbal. But at least in our case, that is because most low-scoring applicants have many other problems in their applications.

    Reply
  9. Fritz Warfield

    The applicant writes: "This is a financial burden I am willing to suffer if and only if my application receives a complete and thorough review."

    What is a complete and thorough review? Does it mean reading every page of a writing sample? If so, then I doubt any program gives *every* applicant a "complete and thorough review". I don't know if other programs have GRE cutoffs. I know that Notre Dame does not. Admitted students do tend to have high GREs for reasons like those Ned and Laurie mention and more.

    Here's how a large number of applications (more than half of the total number in a typical year) get eliminated before a full reading of a writing sample. This reports my own practice. I don't know how closely my practice resembles how others work. At Notre Dame the admissions chair looks at every application. When I am on the committee as I often am, I also look at every application. For many applications I see the following: (a) what appears to be a weak transcript, either concerning philosophy background, grades, or both; (b) average or below average GRE scores; (c) letters that don't in any way indicate that the student is a standout or that the GRE and/or transcript is deceptively weak. In such a case I'll start reading the writing the sample and in most cases I'll get quick confirmation that the student is not a plausible applicant to our program and I'll stop reading and not recommend the file for further consideration. This year my judgement exactly matched the judgement of the Notre Dame admissions chair about what files to eliminate from consideration at the early stage in well over 95% of the cases. Where our initial judgements did not match, the file was kept alive for further consideration.

    As for the specific role of GRE in our committee discussions I'll share the following. GRE was mentioned a few times as a positive concerning students who had perfect or near perfect scores. This may have kept a few files alive for further consideration and scrutiny longer than they would have survived without near perfect scores. GRE was mentioned as a concern for some students who had considerably lower than normal (for admitted students) scores. As Ned indicated is the case at Harvard, this usually leads us to ask further questions about the file, but it won't do more than that.
    By "GRE scores" I here mean math and verbal scores. No one here every pays attention to the GRE writing score except to occasionally remark on applicants with wonderfully written submitted writing samples who received very low GRE writing scores.

    Reply
  10. Zvi Biener

    Perhaps a useful note from an MA program: At Western Michigan University, where I am the admissions director, there are no automatic cutoffs. Low GRE scores can be counterbalanced by recommendations, a good sample, good grades, or a good explanation as to why they are low (e.g., English as a second language). However, they need to be counterbalanced by something — the lower they are, the more weighty the counterbalance. We have admitted people with scores several hundred points lower than people we have rejected. This is, in fact, a rather common occurrence.

    My suggestion to undergraduates is that they consult with their local philosophy advisors (not *general* academic advisors, but someone who knows the philosophical playing field). Every set of applications should include some "safe" and some "reach" schools, but it should be centered around schools that the candidate has a good chance of getting into. These categories are difficult to pin down without a working knowledge of the field (even with public rankings) and a third-person evaluation of the candidate's merit.

    Reply
  11. John Collins

    There is no GRE cutoff at Columbia either. We do take note of the scores, but they carry far less weight than the writing sample and letters of recommendation. As Ned says, an otherwise strong looking application with particularly low GRE scores will probably receive extra scrutiny, but no application is rejected on the basis of GRE results alone.

    Reply
  12. Jonathan Cohen

    I am the DGS in philosophy (and ex officio member of the grad admissions committee) at UC San Diego, and can report that our procedures are similar to what L. A. Paul reports at UNC: there is no firm GRE score cutoff for consideration, and we look at every single file. However candidates with relatively weaker GRE scores (or for that matter any relatively weak part of the dossier) are typically therefore regarded as more of a risk for admissions, and so the committee would ordinarily want to see something else in the dossier that compensates for the weakness — i.e., makes the risk look lower.

    I would also mention, as a general matter (not about UCSD in particular) that admissions decisions are made by committees whose members at a given department often have differing views about both the importance of the various components in an admissions file and the right way to treat the individual components. So it could be that a 650 verbal GRE is a reason for being skeptical for one reader but not to another reader even within the same department. I'm afraid that's just a fact of life: there is no uncontroversial assessment metric for candidates, so committee members just have to read the files and make judgments about what they think is important, and then hash out their differences somehow around the committee table.

    Reply
  13. David Sobel

    I doubt that many of even the best departments would use such a cutoff. I am actually surprised to hear that any do. Places I have been associated with (sadly, not the top departments) would certainly look at letters, transcripts, and GREs before making an initial cut and have no informal GRE cutoff.

    However, the student’s comments could be taken in a different spirit. Perhaps the better formulation of the student’s worry is that a lot of people are applying to the better grad programs despite not having a realistic chance of getting in because they do not appreciate how competitive such departments are. Some information about what a typical accepted applicant looks like in terms of grades and GRE’s might be useful to avoid this. Such information would have to be tempered with the thought that great letters can overcome a lot. So too can, after one survives a cut, a great writing sample. It would not be trivial to give potential applicants a sense of what it takes to be a plausible candidate at this or that grad program, but I find myself thinking with this undergraduate that doing so could save money and time on the part of a lot of people.

    Reply
  14. John Morrison

    Columbia doesn't use a cutoff and we've admitted students with verbal scores below 600. Our decisions are primarily based on the writing sample. Out of 304 applicants this last year, we read the writing sample of every applicant who made the initial cut (approx. 180) and a candidate with disastrous GRE scores would make the initial cut as long as his/her letters or grades were reasonable.

    Reply
  15. Mark Schroeder

    I'm DGS at USC and chair of graduate admissions. We have no cutoff for GRE scores. To advance to a second round of consideration, an application must be viewed by both of its initial readers as one of the more promising applications in their pile, or viewed neutrally by one reader and strongly endorsed by the other. The initial review involves looking at all parts of the file other than the writing sample, and I think it is fair to say that the only thing that can absolutely sink a file at this stage by itself is the letters.

    Brian's correspondent suggests that paying the admissions fee gives him the right to have his writing sample read. As I've just noted, we do not read every writing sample, and I would be quite surprised if any graduate program does. Graduate admissions is a very time-intensive process, we admit 10% of applicants or fewer, and there is no reason to think that poring over scores of writing samples from the bottom third of the pile in terms of other signs of promise is going to be time well-spent. Writing samples are most useful for discriminating how to understand what letters really mean, for getting a sense for philosophical maturity, and for completing a picture about who we're deciding between. So I make no apologies for not reading every writing sample. There is no conflict here with giving every file full and complete consideration.

    In general, we don't admit every student who meets a certain standard to our program; we only admit the very best, whatever the competition. So it is impossible to articulate any standard, and that can be unsatisfying to some of the very good applicants we need to deny. But I don't think there's much to be gained from generalizing from anecdotes; every student we admit is a unique decision to invest in someone with a particular combination of strengths and weaknesses for which we believe we'll be able to help them capitalize on those strengths and grow out of those weaknesses, and each decision is different.

    Reply
  16. Lucky Applicant

    For what it's worth, I only scored a 640 on verbal but still managed to do fairly well this admissions cycle. I'm in at my first choice, a top 5 department. It would have certainly be nice to have a higher verbal score, but I don't think it would have made a big difference without good letters and grades. The entire admission process is very frustrating and very opaque–I understand where you are coming from. I think it would be very useful for departments to be more candid about how they consider GRE scores and review applications on their websites. More transparency would be greatly appreciated by nervous applicants!

    Reply
  17. Eric Brown

    As DGS at Wash U in St. Louis, I can report that our procedure is just like the one Mark S. describes, which makes it very similar to the others that have been described in this thread. As others have reported, I've noticed that some of my colleagues put more weight on GRE scores than others do, but I've not seen an application nixed or promoted solely because of its GRE scores. As it turns out–and again, this seems to be typical–most of those we admit have high scores, but it is not the case that everyone we admit has high scores.

    Reply
  18. Prospective Student

    Original Poster here:

    I appreciate all of the responses. Save Notre Dame, I did not apply to any of the schools represented thus far. It sounds like all of these schools do not employ automatic cutoffs. This is good to know; although, I am not very surprised to hear from such schools. I doubt the schools that actually employ covert GRE cutoffs are anxious to announce their disingenuous techniques.

    The consensus, at least amongst the posters so far, is that other application materials counteract or even overshadow poor GRE scores. My other materials are as follows: 3.875 overall gpa with a 4.0 in major from a (rather average?) state school; from what I’ve been told, glowing letters of recommendation that contain high praise such as…“this student is one of the top three students I’ve instructed in 20 years” and “this student has the most native ability and is the most well-read of all the undergraduate students I’ve encountered”; and, a writing sample that (I hope) reflects the praise of my professors.

    I’ve been shut out. This might be the result of the redoubtable competition out there. It’s hard to know from my position. My gut feeling is that my poor GRE scores have at the very least colored the rest of my application materials, and thus have unduly influenced how my other materials have been interpreted.

    Perhaps GRE score should be looked at only as a LAST resort? But, then again, if all the materials are getting reviewed, then it would be superfluous to look at GREs since the reviewers would already know if the “1150” student was more capable than the “1600” student.

    Reply
  19. Karl Schafer

    I've never been chair of admissions here at Pitt, but I'm quite sure we don't apply a cut-off of this sort. In fact, I can think of plenty of times people with really *quite* low GRE scores were admitted to our program or at least made it onto our very-short-list. As seems to be true of most places mentioned here, we treat GRE scores as having some evidential value, but we take this value to be very limited. (As, of course, any reasonable person would!)

    Reply
  20. Critiquemythinking

    I was accepted to a (MA) program with less than a 700 verbal score and I did not have any connections or inside relationships in the department to which I applied or previous Master's experience/degrees (I also did not have an outstandingly brilliant writing sample). If I had to credit one thing besides a GRE score, it might be my recommenders (their letters, credentials, or publications, etc.). I understand that I still might be the exception to the 'rule' you mention, but I thought my experience could be worth sharing.
    _Nick

    Reply
  21. William Parkhurst

    "Here are some PREDICTED average GRE scores for the graduate students at the following departments (with their standard deviations from the total test-taking population):

    (15th) City University of New York Graduate Center:
    724 verbal (2.21 SD), 758 quantitative (1.17 SD), and 1482 total (1.69 SD).

    (10th) University of California-Berkeley:
    735 verbal (2.31 SD), 766 quantitative (1.22 SD), 1501 total (1.77 SD).

    (5th) University of Michigan-Ann Arbor:
    746 verbal (2.4 SD), 774 quantitative (1.28 SD), 1520 total (1.84 SD).

    (3rd) Princeton University: 750 verbal (2.44 SD), 777 quantitative (1.3 SD), 1527 total (1.87 SD).

    (1st) New York University: 754 verbal (2.47 SD), 780 quantitative (1.32 SD), 1534 total (1.9 SD."

    I thought these predictions might be useful for other students. These are top schools which do not post their average GRE scores. Any thoughts on the accuracy?

    More information on these numbers: http://philosorapters.blogspot.com/2011/03/philosophy-graduate-students-gres.html

    Reply
  22. Mike Valdman

    A number of people involved in graduate admissions have said that they give GRE scores very little weight relative to grades, letters, and a writing sample. But why should this be? GREs, of course, aren't entirely reliable indicators of philosophical talent. But neither is anything else. Letters, we all know, are often highly inflated. Writing samples are useful, but you don't know how much writing help an applicant received. Grades would be very useful if every applicant took the same courses with the same professors or if departments provided information about median grades or class rank, but, as far as I know, they don't. GREs, of course, don't test for philosophical ability directly, but they test for the kinds of analytic skills that are crucial for doing good philosophy, and since every applicant takes essentially the same test and does so entirely on his or her own, a significant disparity between applicants' scores tells you something meaningful about their abilities. The GRE, I suspect, is the least corruptable part of an applicant's file.

    To be clear, I'm not suggesting that admissions decisions should be based largely on GRE scores. Clearly, there's a limit to their usefulness. But I'm surprised that so many regard it as a rather trivial component of an applicant's file.

    Reply
  23. Aldo Antonelli

    I have been doing admissions here at Davis for a couple of years and our procedures are to those outlined by Eric Schwitzgebel at UC Riverside (maybe it's a UC thing). Each file gets read by at least two people from the areas the applicant has expressed interest in. There is no GRE cutoff, although a weak GRE is one further piece of information. Personally, I find that the best indicator by far is the writing sample, and I pay special attention to that. Letters tend to be inflated (everybody is in the top 5%, you have to wonder how that can happen). One note about GREs, though: here at Davis at least fellowships are awarded by the graduate school, not the department, and folks over there are easily impressed by high GRE scores. So we tend to look for double-800s who would make particularly strong fellowship candidates.

    Reply
  24. Prospective Student

    Original Poster here:

    I appreciate all of the responses. Save Notre Dame, I did not apply to any of the schools represented thus far. It sounds like all of these schools do not employ automatic cutoffs. This is good to know; although, I am not very surprised to hear from such schools. I doubt the schools that actually employ covert GRE cutoffs are anxious to announce their disingenuous techniques.

    The consensus, at least amongst the posters so far, is that other application materials counteract or even overshadow poor GRE scores. My other materials are as follows: 3.875 overall gpa with a 4.0 in major from a (rather average?) state school; from what I’ve been told, glowing letters of recommendation that contain high praise such as…“this student is one of the top three students I’ve instructed in 20 years” and “this student has the most native ability and is the most well-read of all the undergraduate students I’ve encountered”; and, a writing sample that (I hope) reflects the praise of my professors.

    I’ve been shut out. This might be the result of the redoubtable competition out there. It’s hard to know from my position. My gut feeling is that my poor GRE scores have at the very least colored the rest of my application materials, and thus have unduly influenced how my other materials have been interpreted.

    Perhaps GRE score should be looked at only as a LAST resort? But, then again, if all the materials are getting reviewed, then it would be superfluous to look at GREs since the reviewers would already know if the “1150” student was more capable than the “1600” student.

    Reply
  25. b. warmke

    Mike Valdman writes: "GREs, of course, don't test for philosophical ability directly, but they test for the kinds of analytic skills that are crucial for doing good philosophy, and since every applicant takes essentially the same test and does so entirely on his or her own, a significant disparity between applicants' scores tells you something meaningful about their abilities."

    What specific analytic skills are tested by the GRE? The best ways of memorizing hundreds of obscure words? The best ways of finding clever tricks to solve geometry problems? Is this what philosophers need to be able to do? My sense is that the only kind of skill the GRE tests is how well you can take the GRE. (Indeed, GRE prep courses even tell you this is how to think about the test.) Further, it tests students using rules that are nowhere used in professional philosophy (e.g. the test is strictly timed).

    In full disclosure, I did pretty terribly on the GRE in relation to my peers. But I am thankful that some departments gave me a chance in spite of that. As the above testimony suggests, most departments do not use a cut-off rule, but some might. There would be tremendous pressure not to reveal this, however, because this would be a very easy to way to cut in half the amount of applications they receive (and the concomitant amount of coin they receive from application fees).

    Reply
  26. Keith DeRose

    I've done graduate admissions a number of times and at three different philosophy departments, for a terminal MA program at my first job and for PhD programs at the other departments. There has never been a policy about how to weigh GRE scores — or, really, about how to weigh any other part of the applications, either. What committees tend to have policies about is how to get from the evaluations given by those who do the initial screenings to a short list of candidates for the whole committee to look at and then how to arrive at the list of applicants to admit. But those doing the initial screenings and then the final evaluations aren't told how heavily to weigh what in arriving at their evaluations. I appreciate the student's feelings who wrote above, "I think it would be very useful for departments to be more candid about how they consider GRE scores and review applications on their websites. More transparency would be greatly appreciated by nervous applicants!" But it not as if departments have policies about how things get weighed and aren't revealing these policies. It's rather, at least in my experience, that there are no policies about such things in place to be revealed, and how much weight is given to what can vary from one evaluator to the next. I think it's best to keep things that way, because I think policies that directed evaluators on how much weight to give to what would result in worse decisions being made.

    It is good, though, if information is made available about the rate at which applicants with various scores get into various programs.

    It's hard for me even to securely discern how much weight *I myself* give to GRE scores — though I'm pretty sure it's not very much. I look at them, and they are one of several "quick" pieces of information I take in very early on in my evaluation of a file and contribute to an overall picture I start to form. But I have too much past experience of them being bad indicators for me to put much trust in them.

    Reply
  27. Antony Eagle

    I'm director of graduate admissions in philosophy at Oxford. We don't require the GRE, and so of course don't have any GRE cutoff. But in other respects our practice is very much in line with those mentioned by almost all DGSs/DGAs above. All applications are examined in their totality by members of the admissions committee in an initial round. At this stage no one component of an application is sufficient to determine a decision not to consider the application at later stages, though (as others have remarked) an application with weaker letters and grades in upper level philosophy classes would have a harder time making it to subsequent rounds. I endorse Mark Schroeder's point that none of this is inconsistent with giving all applications "a complete and thorough review".

    Reply
  28. Gotmedieval

    With all these DGSes bending over backwards to insist that, at best, a GRE score is the least important part of the application and a decider only in rare cases, you'd think schools would have dropped it a long time ago.

    For many students, the cost of prepping for and taking the test doubles or triples their application season financial outlay. We're talking $1000-1500 here. Even with no prep, it's an extra $200 to take the test and report scores. Seems a lot to ask of your applicants if you really don't think it's that important.

    BL COMMENT: Most universities require their PhD programs to get GRE scores, and they are often a factor in university-wide competitions for fellowship support.

    Reply
  29. Fritz Warfield

    The original poster adds this:

    "My other materials are as follows: 3.875 overall gpa with a 4.0 in major from a (rather average?) state school; from what I’ve been told, glowing letters of recommendation that contain high praise such as…“this student is one of the top three students I’ve instructed in 20 years” and “this student has the most native ability and is the most well-read of all the undergraduate students I’ve encountered”; and, a writing sample that (I hope) reflects the praise of my professors."

    For an applicant with this sort of partial profile, much would depend on what the school is and whether in our collective experience we have a sense of what letters like that from that school really indicate. But unless I had some clear reason to be skeptical about the letters, one with a partial profile like this would likely pass on for further review including a full and careful reading of the writing sample. At that point the applicant would still be in competition in our pool with well over a hundred applicants who survive the first cutdown. Most of these will eventually be rejected including several dozen described as the best in 20+ years from the schools from which they apply. As Mark Schroeder importantly noted, admissions is *highly* competitive and the competition is relative to the others in the pool and not to some fixed standard.

    Reply
  30. Finally A Grad Student

    Another factor to consider is, of course, that some institutions may have GRE requirements at levels above the department — i.e., Graduate School, College of Arts and Sciences, Office of Graduate Admissions, etc. — depending on the stucture and nature of the institutions.

    I spent several years working in Admissions and Student Recruitment jobs, and know (at least in one instance from first hand experience) that administrative requirements can bar students from being considered. This is primarily for the PR gloss — an Admissions office / higher administrative entity loves to put high average scores for admitted students in their promotional and recruiting materials. In attempting to create the appearance of An Outstanding Graduate Education at This University (TM), such minimums may be enforced outside the department. Thus a candidate — perhaps even one a department finds desirable — may find her application challenged at a higher level.

    To the original poster, it sounds as though you are feeling cheated; I sympathize with you have been in your seat myself. But — as many other commenters on the subject have undoubtedly blogged before — the admissions process is very competitive, and often random. Failure to achieve admission is not an indication of your suitability for the field, nor is it an indication of the possibility for future success or your intelligence. An anecdotal example — though hardly demonstrative of a general trend — from my own experience: I did very poorly my first time around (with no admission anywhere), but have since been admitted to a department (one I did not consider with sufficient seriousness initially) that is an extremely good match for me, and overall a great place to work with good funding. It did take some time to get there. On the other hand, a dear friend of mine, who did quite well in the first round of applications (receiving several admissions to top programs), choose to go first to law school, and did much more poorly (no admissions anywhere) in for Philosophy Ph.D. programs after finishing than the resounding success of the first round would have led anyone to believe. It is more like gambling at a casino than, I think, anyone would have us believe.

    Reply
  31. Mike Valdman

    The GRE certainly has its flaws. But consider its virtues. It tests reading comprehension, the relations between concepts, the subtleties of language, and your powers of deductive reasoning (what one commentator calls “finding clever tricks to solve geometry problems”). Unlike course grades, the GRE is standardized. And it’s refreshingly impartial. Your undergraduate professors may be invested in your success, but the GRE isn’t. It doesn’t care where you’re from or who you know. You can’t cajole or complain your way to a higher score. It won’t show you any favoritism, and it will assess you by the same criteria it assesses everyone else. As I said earlier, it’s an application’s least corruptible part.

    Should it be given more weight than letters, grades, etc.? Of course not. But I don’t see why it should be regarded as trivial or as a mere tie-breaker.

    Reply
  32. An Incoming Grad

    This might be, well is, tangential to the main line of contention here, but it did come up.

    When it comes to the efficacy of the GRE scores in giving information relevant to one's philosophical ability, I think, two clearly distinct issues fail to be pointed out as so.

    One relates to the quality/property of the individual that the GRE looks to measure. I do not know what the official line is, but as far as I can see it has to be Mental Aptitude (more or less to be read as intelligence). Now, I'd be gob-smacked if I were told Mental Aptitude does not play a role (not saying it's all that matters, but that it plays a very very significant role) in one's philosophical ability, and I don't think anyone can seriously believe that it doesn't. So any reliable measure of this property is going to be a very useful piece of information for admissions committees.

    However, there is the second issue, a totally distinct one, regarding the reliability of GRE scores as measures of Mental Aptitude; regarding the ability of the GRE to measure what I suppose it sets out to (and if not that then what??). And there I think many a good finger can and ought to be raised. But, it will bode well for us to be very mindful of the distinction between these two issues.

    To sum up relying on GRE scores requires justification from two distinct quarters. One, does GRE look to measure what is relevant to the purposes? I think here the reliance on GRE scores is justified. But, we must also ask does it succeed to a reliable degree in measuring what it looks to? Here, I think some thought is needed and if one is inclined to answer not then one ought to be inclined to find reliance on GRE scores for the current purposes as unjustified.

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  33. Lisa Shapiro

    The original poster doesn't indicate whether he (or she) has an MA or not, or even applied to MA programs, but I sense that she (or he) is just finishing an undergrad degree. Some MA programs are willing to consider late applications (depending on what their yield from admissions has been), and the poster and others in a similar position might consider pursuing an MA with the idea of gearing up to graduate level work and preparing a really good writing sample.

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  34. Joseph

    I want to emphasize the original poster's later comment that the comments in this thread will obviously come mostly from those programs that don't use such cutoffs since those that do would have no good reason to do so here. Personally, I went to a prospective student weekend a few weeks back and the DGS of that department, who shall remain nameless, told me that the original 250 applications were reduced to 70 based on GRE and GPA alone. That said, this this was not a particularly well ranked department (it shows up in some of the specialty rankings but not the overall rankings) and so the range of GPA and GRE scores that came in, I imagine, was wider, making this a more reasonable method.

    That said, I find this whole venture to find out how much weight is put into the GRE to be kind of a waste of time. First realize that we as applicants are not going to get rid of the GRE requirement by raising its irrelevance with any audience, this blog included. It's far too entrenched at this point. Seeing it as something here to stay for the time being, what kind of information could any DGS or DGA post here that would make you change your plan of attack in the admissions process? The only one that comes to mind for me is that you would somehow get sufficient information to put less effort into your GRE studies. That seems dumb to me. I say we as applicants focus our time and energy in making EVERY element of our dossier as strong as we can. Period. The stakes are far too high to find to lower your guard on any element, so treat them ALL as crucial. This is why I took a year "off" after graduating to strengthen my applications, and I believe it worked in my favor.

    What I think programs CAN do that would be of immense help to broke ass applicants such as myself is what two of the 14 programs I applied to this year have done, namely, ask the candidate to self report their GRE scores and then verify them through an official report by the ETS only AFTER the candidate is offered admission. As was revealed in an earlier thread, many admissions committees are in the dark about the $23/school fee that has been such a headache to all of us. Not only would it help appicants financially, but it would ease the burden on members of the committee and administrative staff by reducing the amount of paper to juggle and consolidating an applicant's dossier materials into an already prearranged single packet, rather than having to match it up with the report from ETS (this latter point can be made about self reporting transcripts as well).

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  35. Another Incoming Grad

    I had a similar experience as Joseph above, except that I spoke with a faculty member on the ad comm, not the DGS, and I was told that the applicant pool was narrowed down from 200+ to about 50 that were seriously considered– and GRE scores were the first screen (I don't know how many folks were eliminated based on GRE since there may well have been several levels of screening in between).

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  36. Mark Schroeder

    Some of the tone of recent applicants contributing to this thread suggests that departments might be unwilling to disclose how hard it really is to be admitted because it inflates their application numbers, deflates their acceptance rate, and fills their coffers with fees from poor applicants. Let's be serious about the incentives of the people actually doing the work of graduate admissions. None of us see the application fees, which cover administrative overhead and pay support staff in graduate admissions. Even if we did see the money, the total amounts are small relative to the decisions being made – at USC, it wouldn't even come close to covering the cost of our open house for admitted students, for example. And departments have every incentive to work hard to find promising applicants, with every decision meaning an investment of upwards of $100,000 over five or more years. Believe me, we all want to find students who are better than our existing students but are not admitted anywhere else. We all make decisions that turn out not to be the best sometimes, but it's not for lack of effort and incentive.

    I spend a lot of time corresponding with prospective applicants about whether their application credentials are realistic, and I never encourage false optimism; fewer applications actually saves me quite a bit of work. I don't know why anyone would want to inflate their application pool with unrealistic candidates.

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  37. Jamie Dreier

    I was chair of Brown's admission committee this year. Our practice is in the same ballpark as others who have reported here. The work is done by committee, some of whose members will put more stress on GRE scores than others. (I don't pay too much attention to GREs.) There is no threshold.

    It would be a huge mistake to do a first screening on the basis of GPA. At the very least you have to look at how hard the classes were, how demanding the institution is, and how relevant the courses were to philosophy.

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  38. Carolyn Suchy-Dicey

    This sentiment may be common to most, but I find both the suggestion that there is a single test for general mental ability and the suggestion that such a test is what is key to determining whether someone should be admitted to a graduate program crude and a little disturbing.

    Here is a personal anecdote: I took the GRE while at St Andrews, which involved my taking a trip to London that was costly and time-consuming. I was naive and anyhow misunderstood the examiner's instructions and thought that the "research section" would come last, and so skimmed through that section. In fact the research section can show up at any point in the exam and, as chance would have it, mine had shown up first, meaning that I scored a 590 on the skimmed section–the verbal section. (For comparison, I scored a 760 in the quantitative section and a 6 on the analytical writing section). Naive to a fault, I decided not to re-take the exam because I couldn't believe that my score on a general exam (still in the 80th percentile for verbal) would make or break my acceptance into graduate school. I went on to apply for three graduate schools (NYU, Princeton, and Pittsburgh) and was not accepted into any of them, although I understand that this had to do with the weight of my letters (specifically, the name recognition of my letter writers). In any case, I underestimated what it takes to get into graduate school in philosophy on every front.

    Here is the relevance to this forum: even if I had understood the instructions, the fact that the research section is randomly distributed means that some students will have an advantage over others. That is, those whose research section comes last will likely perform better than those whose research section comes first. When we look at the difference between two candidates for entry into graduate school, this difference can be devastating if GRE scores are taken too seriously–it could amount to mistaking increased mental exhaustion for lower mental competence.

    Such problems, as I see it, are only the tip of the iceberg. The deepest, darkest worries I have about this issue concern the obsession with intelligence instead of skill as a marker of worth in our profession. The skill of generously reading one's opponent, for example, is a virtue that should, I think, matter more than high-level computational difference.

    Finally, I have to admit that despite these worries I have no solution to the problem of comparing students across disciplines for university-wide fellowships. If everyone could agree that the flourishing of the disciplines is foundational to the university, then maybe some discipline-based settlement could be reached (such as giving each department some number of presidential fellowships to be awarded as they see fit), but so long as the university sees itself as a commodity that has more value the higher it is ranked, we will probably have to be slaves to the various cross-discipline ranking systems, despite the inadequacy of their methods.

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  39. Bill Bristow

    I am chairing the admissions committee for the MA program at UW-Milwaukee this year. We do not use a GRE cutoff, and the applicants' GRE scores do not weigh heavily in our decisions on admissions. They are one factor in our decisions, but among the others, relatively less important.

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  40. Anonymous

    All the talk has been of the importance of the verbal section. One philosopher (of physics, which might explain at this) at a top 5 program told me that the math section weighed more heavily.

    Something to note about what the GRE may be to likely to track with:
    The more elite the undergrad institution, the higher the average SAT. And those students have access to professors with the highest name values to write letters for them. Students who did well on the SAT are probably going to do well on the GRE. My combined score is extremely close.

    And like so much of life, a lot of this luck. I went to a top 25 lib arts college with an excellent reputation. But it was at a point of high turnover in the faculty. One died before I could a letter for him. By the time I left, I think only member of the dept was a full prof. So my letters lacked name recognition. These are the things that just happen in life that are beyond anyone's control.

    That being said, a student who applied to grad school a few years ahead of me, with absolutely perfect grades – and a slew of A+s – and near perfect GREs, didn't get into any top 10 programs, either.

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  41. current graduate

    Although I don't know much about the admissions process, I'm guessing that intuition plays an important role in decisions–especially at later stages of the process. And I presume that the more experience a person has serving on committees contributes to more refined intuitions, since it affords the committee member with more opportunities to observe the relation between applications and student types. And, also, I'm guessing that these decisions will vary from department to department and from year to year depending upon the department or committee's preferred student type ( such as whether the department prefers students that display a certain type of imagination/originality, has the ability to write in a particular way, has a particular character, and so on), along with the department's perceived strengths in training students of one type over another,the department's strength in particular philosophical specialties, and so forth. None of this, however, is necessarily a bad thing; departments certainly have the right to select whomever they prefer. In any case, I presume that the role of intuition, or having a feel for particular applications, is largely what makes it so difficult to provide students with a complete picture of the admissions process, and also why students often feel that luck plays such a large role with respect to admittances. (But, with that said, there are likely some departments that could be more transparent about their admissions procedure.)

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  42. J.S. Nelson

    One thing I haven't heard mentioned yet is departmental compatibility. I'm under the impression that programs want to admit not just star students, but star students that would actually fit in. Whether or not you really demonstrate an interest in some of the same stuff as the faculty can help you or hurt you.
    I applied to a very wide range of programs, almost all of which I now understand were fairly inappropriate for me, and there are some places where I think that might have prevented me from getting in.
    At the same time, I got in at one of the absolute best places you can be at if you want to do the stuff that I want to do, and I don't think it was on the strength of the standard app. stuff: my GPA was just OK, my GREs were mixed (high math, middle verbal, very low writing), my letter writers were allegedly very positive, but none of them were from philosophy and two of them were only very briefly acquainted with me. But I'd taken a few classes, and written a letter that indicated that my background was just the kind of thing they were looking for (someone who would thrive here), and I think that's what got me in here (and nowhere else).

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  43. Tim

    Has anyone conducted a formal study to indicate if GRE scores are reliable prognosticators of program completion or quality of argumentation? I would assume that it would be a much less reliable predictor of student success than grades (even at second tier institutions) and strong letters. Why would we trust a one-sitting quantification over evidence of four years of hard work and well-cultivated relationships? There's utility to gauging from a test, to be sure, but without evidence, many departments who weigh the GRE heavily have risked their legacies upon a fallacious assumption: that an extremely brief engagement students have with a private corporation will reveal the complexity of their capacity. This would be an excellent time to begin such a study.

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  44. Fritz Warfield

    "many departments who weigh the GRE heavily have risked their legacies upon a fallacious assumption"…

    I don't think there are any departments that weigh the GRE heavily. The fact that most or even all leading departments admit classes with high GREs does not show that GRE is weighted heavily. And testimony from others heavily involved in admissions at a wide range of schools confirms what I know to be the case for my own department. In particular: the GRE is one small factor overall; it plays a modest role early in the process along with transcripts, letters, and other material, and then it plays almost no role in later screening and final decisions (at which time the writing sample plays the dominant role).

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  45. Dennis Whitcomb

    Tim, there is a literature on how well GRE scores predict success in grad school. Here's a metastudy that paints the test in a pretty favorable light: web.uvic.ca/psyc/lindsay/teaching/499/readings/kuncel.pdf.

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  46. R. Clarke

    In a recent discussion here, someone provided a link to this abstract of a metastudy of GRE validity; here's the link again:

    http://www.ets.org/gre/research/validity/

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  47. Anonymous

    Is there a Quantitative score below which there are concerns about applicants ability to do formal work, particularly more intensive logic requirements?

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  48. b. warmke

    Mark Schroeder writes: "I don't know why anyone would want to inflate their application pool with unrealistic candidates."

    Say a very top school gets 300 applications at fifty bucks a pop. That's $15k. Suppose only 30 or so students have a realistic shot of getting in. If the department dissuaded the unrealistic applicants from applying and most of them ended up not applying, they would be losing somewhere around $13k. With relative ease they can set aside the unrealistic applications, thereby incurring no great cost, but still receiving a great benefit: the money they can now use to fly out all of prospectives. This is money they would not have had to fly out those same prospectives if they had dissuaded unrealistic applicants from applying on, say, the grounds of one's GRE score being too low.

    Let me be clear: I am in no way impugning the motives of committee members or department chairs: of course no single committee member wants more things to look at. I am just making the point that there is great financial pressure from an administrative standpoint against dissuading unrealistic applicants from applying.

    BL COMMENT: As has already been pointed out, this makes no sense: application fees do not go to the departments.

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  49. Prospective Student

    In response to Joseph,

    My point is not necessarily to change the requirements that are in place. Rather, I would like for there to be more transparency about the process. If a school knows that it is going to make cuts based on a specific score, then it needs to disclose this information to the students. That's all. If the GRE was miraculously dropped, I wouldn't complain. But that is not my beef.

    I must say, there’s a hint of (unintended?) condescension in your post. I’m not trying to get out of GRE study time. I graduated last May. Work – and studying philosophy – got in the way of some study time. But I quit work in November and dedicated 40 days of hardcore studying to the GRE (I took it in December –a mistake). It’s kind of embarrassing how poorly I did on the GRE in light of all this. Regardless, I did not have time to retake it before most of my applications were due. And I was so discouraged by doing so poorly, I could not mentally engage with, or even entertain taking, the GRE again befor the February deadlines. Not to mention, I loathe the thought of giving those money-grubbing ETS people another 160 bucks + the cost of re-sending out scores.

    The truth is – and this is directed at some of Mike Valdmans’s posts too – I scored in-between 680 and 780 on over 10 practice tests (my average was about 720). I was not even worried about the verbal. I dedicated the bulk of my study time (4-8 hours a day) to the math or quantitative section because it involved methods I hadn’t used since high school, which was 13 years ago for me. That said, on my desk right now, I’m looking at a stack of over 2000 verbal flash cards I memorized!!! Anyhow, on the actual test I scored in the low 600s on the quantitative section: exactly where my average was on all the practice tests. But on the verbal section I got in the mid 500s. I was shocked! It was almost 150 points below my average.

    I had a bad day. Nerves got the best of me. The ridiculous essay questions threw me off. ‘Tuche’ was not my side. I should’ve eaten Wheaties instead of Corn Flakes. Who knows? The fact that a ‘bad day’ can count for so much is kind of ridiculous.

    Whatever *it* is that the GRE tells the reviewers, *it* can be gleaned from other aspects of the application. The GREs are convenient way for the reviews to evade meticulous work: if a student’s app is suspect, it is suspect; they shouldn’t rely on a standardized test to tell them this.

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  50. Eddy Nahmias

    Transparency in this case seems relatively easy. Departments could post on their websites two messages about GRE. The first could say something about the role GRE scores play in admissions. Given what has been said above, most such messages would presumably say something like, but should be adjusted as necessary to indicate the truth: "Applicants are required by our university to report GRE scores. The admissions committee uses such scores as one indicator, among many, of potential for success in the program. The committee pays closest to the GRE verbal score, and less attention to GRE quantitative and writing scores. It weighs GRE scores less importantly than GPA, strength of undergraduate training in philosophy, and letters of recommendation. Writing samples are the most significant factor in admissions, especially when selecting the very few spots for admission among the most competitive applicants. The university uses GRE scores as a significant factor in university-wide fellowship competitions." But if departments are using GRE in more significant ways, they should be open about it.

    The second statement could say something like: "Given the role of GRE scores just described, the following information should be treated accordingly. The average GRE scores among applicants in the previous year [or 3 years] was X [Y in verbal, etc.]. The average GRE scores among accepted students in the previous year [or 3 years] was Z [etc.]."

    Of course, the latter statement would take a little work for the admissions director, and then maybe there's reason to post average GPA. And despite what the first statement says, maybe such information about GRE and GPA would backfire by scaring off qualified applicants with low numbers.

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