8 April 2010
The Got Medieval blog is advocating grad schools do just that. And as someone who has just gone through the sausage grinder that is grad school admissions, I couldn’t agree more. I can’t see how the GRE (Graduate Record Examination; the standardized test for admission into American graduate schools) has any relevance whatsoever to success in grad school, and Got Medieval tells you why.
I should note that the only school I got into was the one that doesn’t use the GRE at all (Toronto, being Canadian, doesn’t use the test), although my scores were within the range the schools said were acceptable and my verbal score totally rocked. My test prep was to go the Barnes and Noble route and buy some some books on the test rather than pay tutors; perhaps I should have forked over the $1,000 for a prep course. I don’t know whether or not the GRE played a factor in my case, but I suspect it did in at least some of the schools I applied to. I’m sure that I would perform (relatively) dismally on the new version of the test which combines verbal and math.
But then again, Ph.D. admissions are also highly personalized. One’s application must also fit with the research interests of one or more of the faculty. And not getting into any particular school doesn’t mean that you will not excel at another school. So there is no way of telling what factors played a part in any individual application.
There are no sour grapes on my part. Toronto was my first choice and I couldn’t be happier. (For personal reasons, staying in Berkeley would have been nice, but academically Toronto is where I want to be.)
