Observations from the 2014 admissions cycle
Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014 7:00 pm
Now that the 2014 admissions cycle is coming to a close, I thought it might be helpful for future applicants to share some observations I have made from my experience as well as the experiences of several of my friends.
The absolute importance of the PGRE seems to vary widely from school to school as well as circumstantially. There are some schools (MIT, Princeton, and possibly Stanford) where you need to get a very high score to be a competitive applicant regardless of the rest of your application. However, there are several top twenty and even top ten schools (most notably Michigan, Harvard, Penn, Chicago) that will overlook a poor PGRE score if the rest of your application is great, especially if you have outstanding letters of recommendation and research experience.
You should definitely take the PGRE very seriously, however it is not the end of the world if you don't do quite as well as you would like. It is very bad I believe if you do very poorly (probably below 700), but if you get above this I think you can compensate with other strengths for many top schools. Eat breakfast and read the questions carefully!!!
I also think the PGRE is more important if you come from a school that is not well known as it gives them a means to compare you with other applicants. I think coming from a well known school gives you the advantage that the committees have probably have seen several other applicants from your school. It also makes it very easy to get well known recommenders and funding/opportunities for research. However, I think if you come from a less well known school you can make up for this by spending a summer doing an REU and getting a recommendation from someone there. I also think that there are some REUs which are specifically looking to find potential grad students, so if you do really good work there you are basically in for graduate school.
Grades seem pretty important, but again I think grad school admissions seems to be pretty forgiving as long as you have an upward trend and have challenged yourself. Your recommenders can probably attest to this. Taking grad courses may also help, but I am not sure how much.
It seems that the most important part of the application are letters and research experience. This is where you can stand out as a really great applicant. If you have been recognized as an outstanding researcher as an undergrad, that shows that you have the potential to do great work in grad school as research is much different from taking courses. It's very good to have done research in a group for a while, especially during the year. I would recommend doing this and maybe do an REU the summer after junior year so you can get stuff done at your home institution but also have an experience somewhere else.
I think publications help although you are not disadvantaged if you don't have any. It seems publications are extremely impressive if you are first or second author as in that case there is no doubt then that you contributed significantly.
Don't bother studying for the general GRE. Any time you would waste studying for the general GRE should be used to study for the PGRE. Unless you don't do fairly well on the quantitative section (Like probably above 165 which shouldn't be a problem at all) or do extremely poorly on the other sections (as to raise doubts about basic reading comprehension), no one cares about it AT ALL. At my REU this summer they showed as a graph which revealed that there is pretty much no correlation between acceptance rates and the general GRE.
The absolute importance of the PGRE seems to vary widely from school to school as well as circumstantially. There are some schools (MIT, Princeton, and possibly Stanford) where you need to get a very high score to be a competitive applicant regardless of the rest of your application. However, there are several top twenty and even top ten schools (most notably Michigan, Harvard, Penn, Chicago) that will overlook a poor PGRE score if the rest of your application is great, especially if you have outstanding letters of recommendation and research experience.
You should definitely take the PGRE very seriously, however it is not the end of the world if you don't do quite as well as you would like. It is very bad I believe if you do very poorly (probably below 700), but if you get above this I think you can compensate with other strengths for many top schools. Eat breakfast and read the questions carefully!!!
I also think the PGRE is more important if you come from a school that is not well known as it gives them a means to compare you with other applicants. I think coming from a well known school gives you the advantage that the committees have probably have seen several other applicants from your school. It also makes it very easy to get well known recommenders and funding/opportunities for research. However, I think if you come from a less well known school you can make up for this by spending a summer doing an REU and getting a recommendation from someone there. I also think that there are some REUs which are specifically looking to find potential grad students, so if you do really good work there you are basically in for graduate school.
Grades seem pretty important, but again I think grad school admissions seems to be pretty forgiving as long as you have an upward trend and have challenged yourself. Your recommenders can probably attest to this. Taking grad courses may also help, but I am not sure how much.
It seems that the most important part of the application are letters and research experience. This is where you can stand out as a really great applicant. If you have been recognized as an outstanding researcher as an undergrad, that shows that you have the potential to do great work in grad school as research is much different from taking courses. It's very good to have done research in a group for a while, especially during the year. I would recommend doing this and maybe do an REU the summer after junior year so you can get stuff done at your home institution but also have an experience somewhere else.
I think publications help although you are not disadvantaged if you don't have any. It seems publications are extremely impressive if you are first or second author as in that case there is no doubt then that you contributed significantly.
Don't bother studying for the general GRE. Any time you would waste studying for the general GRE should be used to study for the PGRE. Unless you don't do fairly well on the quantitative section (Like probably above 165 which shouldn't be a problem at all) or do extremely poorly on the other sections (as to raise doubts about basic reading comprehension), no one cares about it AT ALL. At my REU this summer they showed as a graph which revealed that there is pretty much no correlation between acceptance rates and the general GRE.