Biochemistry Graduate School

scaleupchem
Fri, 07 Oct 2011 17:30:19 +0000

I was working on a problem like this at work the other day. There are ways to quantify anything. But I think that more needs to be taken into consideration in the calculation. But this is a very interesting problem to work on though. For example, Harvard’s Physics department sees hundreds, if not thousands of grad apps, all with simular GPAs, Physics GREs and GRE scores. How do the decide who gets in. Well do the use the LORs? But if they are all quality students, they will all have good letters. Do they use the SOPs? Well this gives us insight into passion, drive, and fit. But you can’t unequivocally say that one person is more passionate, about a subject than another based solely upon an essay. Also, someone can be a great fit, but their application as a whole is identical to all the other thousand of applications. There has to be other metrics than GPA, GREs, and SOPs. I think Denizen has something interesting. You could look at each student’s “strength of schedule”. They both had 3.7 GPAs, but how did student A achieve their GPA v. student B. I personally know people who front loaded their transcripts with electives to establish a 4.0 for the first 2 years, and just did ok in their major course work. All in all most ended up with 3.4+ at the end of four years.