Physics GRE Discussion Forums

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what the typical average domestic Physics GRE score is. I know in gradschoolshopper and the AIP book we see for many schools the average Physics GRE score for acceptees. However, I do not know how much higher the average is brought up by international students. Can someone maybe give a rough estimate? As in, if the average Physics GRE score for a school is 850, would it be like 800 for domestics and 900 for internationals? Or is the discrepancy usually even larger?

And would grad schools mind if I emailed them asking for this information?

The one place I've seen this broken out is for University of Texas. The total average is 787, but 733 for domestic students.

They also breakdown their admissions numbers: "For Fall 2006 admission we had approximately 287 Foreign applicants and only accepted 23 for admission. For US applicants there were approximately 183 applicants and 60 were admitted. A total of 83 were admitted with 32 new students enrolling, 11 International and 21 U.S. students."

Another example I came across from http://www.aip.org/gpb/pdf_files/091.pdf ,i.e. gradschoolshopper.com for Colorado @ Boulder:

"The average GRE scores for 2008 – 09 admissions were verbal-625; quantitative-780. The average GRE advanced Physics scores for 2008 – 09 US admissions were 771. The average GRE scores for 2008 – 09 international admissions were verbal-505; quantitative-780. The average GRE advanced Physics scores for 2008 – 09 international admissions were 966."

Somewhat worrying, at least I can wait until I actually have my GRE scores beforing paying any application fees.
Is Colorado @Boulder highly ranked?

I haven't heard anything too fantastic about it in experimental HEP, which is my interest, but they might be good in other subfields. They are at #20 here:

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandr ... phy/search

I think they got CM going on, not sure...

Wow, that is really interesting. I mean I think everyone knew that international students need higher PGRE scores than domestic students, but the I had no idea the selectivity was that different. Im talking about the percentage of domestic applicants accepted versus percentage of international applicants accepted. I guess i figured that they would just take the say top 20% of domestic and top 20% international, but if Texas is representative of other schools then its more like the top 30% of domestic and top 5% of international. I never considered that when looking at the numbers on gradschoolshopper. The acceptace rate for domestic students could be almost twice as high as the overall acceptance rate.

Wow. 966 average for internationals, that's rough.

I just checked the updated PPPL profile: http://www.aip.org/gpb/pdf_files/286.pdf

Things can vary significantly from year to year for small programs... look at these numbers (8 accepted students- 6 domestic, 2 international), quite a bit higher than in older AIP books I saw in the past:

Verbal 90.5%
Quant 94%
Writing 39.75%
Physics 92.5%

Looks like we all got perfect on the math, and we knew a lot of vocab words, but according to ETS we dunt no how two write

Edit: WTF???? Stanford says the following: "The
average GRE scores for 2008–09 admissions were verbal–
569; quantitative–780; analytical–800;" The analytical hasn't been graded out of 800 for years. How could they report such garbage???

Well, if 0 students take the analytical test, I guess mathematically you can literally report the average as whatever number you want. I'm surprised Stanford didn't claim a 200000 as their average.

I think boulder is popping off in theoretical astro and BEC's

dsperka wrote:Wow, that is really interesting. I mean I think everyone knew that international students need higher PGRE scores than domestic students, but the I had no idea the selectivity was that different. Im talking about the percentage of domestic applicants accepted versus percentage of international applicants accepted. I guess i figured that they would just take the say top 20% of domestic and top 20% international, but if Texas is representative of other schools then its more like the top 30% of domestic and top 5% of international. I never considered that when looking at the numbers on gradschoolshopper. The acceptace rate for domestic students could be almost twice as high as the overall acceptance rate.

E-mail a department and asks for statistics on the program because youre interested in applying and would like to see if youre competitive. I have seen statistics for programs which have a domestic acceptance rate greater than 2 times that of internationals.