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MIT's grad schools jettisoned GRE consideration a while ago. As you say, the GRE quant is trivial by MIT's standards, and the GRE verbal largely irrelevant. I

MIT's grad schools jettisoned GRE consideration a while ago. As you say, the GRE quant is trivial by MIT's standards, and the GRE verbal largely irrelevant. It's fairly easy to spot the "heavy-hitters" just from recommendations, undergraduate publication record, thesis, and GPA. In short, MIT and its elite cohort (CMU, Caltech, etc.) only accept undergrads who found their way into their professor's research groups -- this feat in and of itself is a superior indicator.

knzhou 7y ago
Absolutely! I have a lot more faith in grad admissions than undergrad, because there's so much more good signal. Unfortunately nothing like this is available when people are in high school.
DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
GPA is difficult, because there's no uniform standard. A 3.9 GPA from Caltech is much more impressive than a 3.9 GPA from Harvard (where there's serious grade inflation), but then again, you have to look carefully at which specific courses went into that GPA. But how do you compare those numbers to a grade of 15/20 from a French university, or a 1.1 from a German university, or some other country whose system you don't know? Undergrad research (including a published first-author paper) is almost a requirement now for entry into many top programs. But you have to know the research group the student worked with, and you get applications from all over the world. The subject GRE is a uniform quantitative baseline. It isn't everything (or even most of everything), but it is a somewhat objective standard that can at least flag applicants who might have real difficulty in a top program. The thing is, I've heard "equity" arguments for disregarding not only the subject GRE, but also published research ("Not everyone has the opportunity to do research as an undergrad") and letters of reference ("Letter writers suffer from implicit bias"). The "equity" advocates seem to want to throw out every piece of relevant information. Of course, that makes it easier to hit whatever targets "equity" requires.
- jimmyvalmer 7y ago
  > A 3.9 GPA from Caltech is much more impressive than a 3.9 GPA from Harvard Having been an undergrad at one of the above, I can assure you both are super impressive (in either STEM or humanities), and should garner special attention from graduate programs. > The subject GRE is a uniform quantitative baseline. It seems we've moved off the topic of undergraduate acceptances to elite graduate admissions. The dearth of slots at these rarefied levels relative to the global supply of smart people is such that results from an arbitrary exam coming out of New Jersey would only get a second look in the narrowest of "splitting hairs" cases.
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    > Having been an undergrad at one of the above, I can assure you both are super impressive They're both great institutions, but the grades from one are much less meaningful than the grades from the other.

knzhou 7y ago

Absolutely! I have a lot more faith in grad admissions than undergrad, because there's so much more good signal. Unfortunately nothing like this is available when people are in high school.

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago

GPA is difficult, because there's no uniform standard. A 3.9 GPA from Caltech is much more impressive than a 3.9 GPA from Harvard (where there's serious grade inflation), but then again, you have to look carefully at which specific courses went into that GPA. But how do you compare those numbers to a grade of 15/20 from a French university, or a 1.1 from a German university, or some other country whose system you don't know? Undergrad research (including a published first-author paper) is almost a requirement now for entry into many top programs. But you have to know the research group the student worked with, and you get applications from all over the world. The subject GRE is a uniform quantitative baseline. It isn't everything (or even most of everything), but it is a somewhat objective standard that can at least flag applicants who might have real difficulty in a top program. The thing is, I've heard "equity" arguments for disregarding not only the subject GRE, but also published research ("Not everyone has the opportunity to do research as an undergrad") and letters of reference ("Letter writers suffer from implicit bias"). The "equity" advocates seem to want to throw out every piece of relevant information. Of course, that makes it easier to hit whatever targets "equity" requires.

jimmyvalmer 7y ago
> A 3.9 GPA from Caltech is much more impressive than a 3.9 GPA from Harvard Having been an undergrad at one of the above, I can assure you both are super impressive (in either STEM or humanities), and should garner special attention from graduate programs. > The subject GRE is a uniform quantitative baseline. It seems we've moved off the topic of undergraduate acceptances to elite graduate admissions. The dearth of slots at these rarefied levels relative to the global supply of smart people is such that results from an arbitrary exam coming out of New Jersey would only get a second look in the narrowest of "splitting hairs" cases.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  > Having been an undergrad at one of the above, I can assure you both are super impressive They're both great institutions, but the grades from one are much less meaningful than the grades from the other.