Importance of GRE

Ricebound1
Tue, 01 May 2007 16:45:28 +0000

I can talk about philosophy a little bit since I am receiving my MA and will be pursuing my PhD in the fall.

I’ve read quite a bit about the importance of the GRE in getting into graduate schools in philosophy. Most of what I’ve heard is that GRE’s should at least be in the 500’s to be safe from being cut immediately. If your GRE scores are in the high 500’s you are probably pretty safe to at least have a shot to get into MOST philosophy PhD programs. I had a fellow MA student who had scores in the high 400’s/low 500’s who was eventually rejected from all 16 PhD programs to which he applied. He did receive a few wait lists, and all of those programs were in the top 50. Of course, the lower your scores the better your writing sample and letters of rec should be. Remember philosophy applicants have the highest verbal scores on average, and the highest quantitative scores of any of the humanities and social sciences.

All of that being said, I have heard that BY FAR the most important part of the application is the writing sample and then the letters of rec. You just need to make sure that your GRE scores are high enough so that they will even look at the rest of the packet.