GRE and Graduate Funding

Professor_X
Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:44:00 +0000

Very high GREs across the board can supply a good basis for a department to recommend a student for a university-wide fellowship. There are few ways to compare applicants across disciplines, and therefore departments will choose applications with the highest GRE scores to recommend to the fellowship committees (who will be determining awards for all disciplines).

There are some departments that look closely at AW scores. There are some that do not. Personally, I do not weight them heavily in my own admissions decisions, since I believe that at this point, the way they are scored (five paragraph structure, with intro, evidence, counterevidence and conclusion) is too mechanical to adequately make a judgment about an applicant’s writing ability.