Topics Profession

Question I'm applying to very competitive doctoral programs in philosophy. Everything in my application package is stellar except for my GRE scores. How much do admissions committees at competitive programs weigh GRE scores? Does Math matter more than Verbal? Is there a general baseline score I should try to aim at getting over?

Accepted:
December 1, 2005

Comments

Unfortunately, GRE's tend to be very important. Of course, the extent to which they matter or don't matter and the weighting of verbal and math (not to mention baselines) depends upon the specific institution, even the specific composition of the admissions committee, which will vary from year to year. Nevertheless, do what you can to improve your scores. In my experience, verbal tends to be more important. Try to score well into the 90s.

Different departments weigh different parts of the application differently. I don't think that there's a universal baseline score for GREs. GREs are important if they are very low or very high. In my department (University of Massachusetts), we weigh the writing sample fairly heavily. If a graduate department is unfamiliar with your undergraduate institution or with your recommenders, then GREs and writing samples become more important. I'd recommend applying to a range of universities, so that you'll have some back-ups.

As Lynne said, it varies. Most of us have seen enough applications, and known enough students, to know better than to take GREs with anything other than a pound or so of salt. In my own reading of applications, a low verbal score is a red flag, but I'll disregard it if further reading of the student's material doesn't suggest language problems. Similarly, a low quantitative score (or, nowadays, a low "reasoning" score, or whatever it's called) is also a red flag, but it just makes me look harder at other parts of the file.

You don't say whether you are a native speaker of English, but, in my experience, non-native speakers very often have poor GRE scores, even when their spoken and written English is very strong, and even on the Math part. And I've seen such students with excellent GREs, even with high verbal GREs, whose English is so poor they cannot follow a lecture or participate in discussion in a seminar. (There's a lesson there somewhere.) So with non-native speakers, I uniformly disregard GREs, and I'm not the only one. So if you're not a native speaker of English, you should make that clear in your application.

My suggestion would be to discuss this with your advisors. I've often seen letters in which advisor's addressed a student's low GREs and made re-assuring comments.