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Hard limits on GRE scores are reasonable. If you can't pull at lease a 75th percentile on your subject GRE, you probably shouldn't be trying to get a PhD in it
by searine 11y ago
Hard limits on GRE scores are reasonable.
If you can't pull at lease a 75th percentile on your subject GRE, you probably shouldn't be trying to get a PhD in it.
Personally, I got >90th percentile with a bare minimum of studying. I wouldn't be surprised if most of my classmates at the time had the same.
- jseliger 11y agoIf you can't pull at lease a 75th percentile on your subject GRE, you probably shouldn't be trying to get a PhD in it. Depends on your subject. The subject GRE for English lit, for example, is an incredible crapshoot: Much of it concerns passage identification, and if you happen to recognize that this one is from Billy Budd and this one is from Gulliver's Travels, great. If not, you can lose a lot of points in ways that are unlikely to reflect what lit profs are really judged by in the academic market: their ability to write peer-reviewed articles and books.
- cafard 11y agoThis stuff is a lot more systematic now than it was in my own caveman days, and people may for all I know prep more. However, I had a college classmate who had mediocre GREs. This was not the problem for him that it might have been, since he picked his program based on climate (no more snow). He got his Ph.D. and has every since happily taught and published. He was very good at what he studied, but not at taking standardized tests.
- harryjo 11y ago> If you can't pull at lease a 75th percentile on your subject GRE, you probably shouldn't be trying to get a PhD in it. Your system, has, built into its design, a requirement that for each PhD student, 3 others must try to get into a PhD program, to create a top 25 %ile.