The Uber-High GREs: 1580, 1590, 1600

WilliamC
Thu, 28 Sep 2006 08:53:17 +0000

University wide fellowships are often “numbers based”, i.e. on GPA & GRE. Departmental funds may or may not be distributed competitively as well.

My impression generally is that a high GRE is always helpful, but even a relatively low score is not necessarily the killer that a low SAT can be for undergrad. Your preparation, writing sample, SOP, and recs all seem to be more important than the GRE in terms of admission.

The real way to evaluate the issue is to contact the programs you’ll be applying to and ask about their admissions criteria (assuming their websites don’t already provide that information).

All that said, this is the first I’ve heard of a field where admission to the PhD is not “a huge challenge”. I’m in Classics where there are also very few people getting PhDs but the competition is quite intense. Even for mid level programs the admit rates are 20% or less, top programs less than half that. What field are you going into?