4 ms·
Fellow Slug here. They had grades by the time I went there and I used them for grad school applications. But, they still have the narrative evals (Please be r
by Balgair 3y ago
Fellow Slug here.
They had grades by the time I went there and I used them for grad school applications.
But, they still have the narrative evals (Please be right!).
My evals were critical for my grad school applications. All the PIs that I talked with said that they reviewed mine, mostly because it was so unique to have a 50+ page transcript. Their reviewing of my evals was what got me into a few places.
Personally, I treasure those evals. Some were pretty bland and report-y, but enough are good descriptions of myself at a young age from otherwise unbiased observers. Those deeper and longer evals are fantastic and really helped me grow as a young person. Taking them seriously and chewing through them allowed me to choose the right major and the right path, for me, at the time.
Likely, they're gone by now, subsumed into the grind of academia. But I hope they aren't. They were really special and really helpful.
- dekhn 3y agoI don't think my grad program read my narrative evals. Their process is to basically make a stack of applicants and anybody with a GPA lower than 3.5 or so is rejected without any further inspection. An application without a GPA would also be rejected immediately. Fortunately, my conversion table ("Excellent = 4.0, Very Good = 3.5") made the cutoff!
- musicale 3y agoGPAs encouraging and facilitating laziness in graduate admissions doesn't seem like a good justification for them.
- dekhn 3y agoIt's not laziness: if you've got a stack of 100 applicants and a couple hours to produce a list of 15 candidates, it's entirely reasonable to filter out all the applications which have disqualifying errors as quickly as possible.
- musicale 3y agoHeaven forbid that graduate admissions would have to spend more than a 1 or 2 minutes reviewing an application!