Help me figure me out!

Momwaitingfornew
Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:34:01 +0000

Your professors are correct that the GRE is the least important part of your application. Ideally, for those schools, you should be in the top 10% verbally (somewhere in the low 600s), but they won’t discount you because of that score. If the other, more important parts of your application are strong, as they seem to be, the admissions committees probably won’t give your scores a second thought. I’m assuming that you’re in a discipline that requires the submission of a writing sample; an excellent paper will trump verbal scores any day.

Some schools are indeed more test-heavy in their admissions than other schools. Out of the three you mentioned, I’d guess that Berkeley would care the most, and Princeton would care the least.

If you are applying this fall, you really don’t have time to retake them, so I suggest that you not worry and instead concentrate on making your applications as polished as you can.