jsv@hpsad.HP.COM (Jeff Vetter) (08/06/90)
A summary of results from my posting on good GRE scores and good grades follows. Any information regarding the respondents was removed from the text. Additional comments are welcome. The original posting was: >Just exactly what are good grades, good GRE scores, etc? I would like >specific numbers for these quantities. > >I am in the process of applying to graduate school. After speaking (esp. >over the net) to numerous people, I am slightly confused on what is good, >great, excellent, etc. > >My problem: I do not want to send an application, and an application >fee, to a school I have no chance of being admitted to. With the proper >guidence, I can save myself time and money, not to mention the people I >ask to write my recommendations. > >I have received information from several schools. Only UC Berkeley was >kind enough to list the average GPA and average GRE score of those applying >and those admitted. I found this information helpful because I now know >what ranges they are looking for in incoming applicants. This approach >contrasted with the other phases such as "outstanding students", "highly >qualified", "good GRE scores", "excellent grades", etc which do not really >help anyone but the people collecting the application fee. > >>>>> Some questions: >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? >How did you do on the GRE General? >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? >Did you have any publications? journal? >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? >Can I use this information anonymously, if I post the results on the net? ######################################## ########## Begin Replys ################ ######################################## Hello again, Jeff. The information I sent you about OGI has been holding true: about a 675 average on the verbal and quantitative "qualifies" you for CONSIDERATION. I saw the actual average of the 12 Ph.D. acceptees for this fall term and it was approx. 630 verbal (several English-second-language speakers), 710 quant, 680 analytical. There were many rejections who had excellent GRE scores but low grades (i.e. < 3.5), inappropriate educational background (e.g. sociology), research interests inappropriate for OGI (e.g. robotics - we have no such program), or just a sloppy application. The GRE is just another small piece of the judgement puzzle and usually of lesser importance than your GPA, quality of school you attended, research projects, letters of recommendations, and personal essay. Believe me, a couple strong undergraduate research projects that you can explain or a paper you have published in a journal or had accepted at a conference is MUCH more important than the GRE scores. So low scores will disqualify you, high scores will help, and anything in the middle USUALLY HAS LITTLE EFFECT on your acceptance, but that means the other considerations (GPA, etc.) must then better be pretty good. Good luck! ######################################## >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? Purdue, BSEE, 3.86 (top 3%) >How did you do on the GRE General? M 800 V 760 A 800 >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? Engineering: 840, 96% that test >Did you have any publications? journal? Neither. >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? 2 undergrad research projects >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? Applied to Berkeley and MIT, accepted at Berkeley Hope this helps. I'm not sure how industry experience helps your chances, other than the (BIG) plus of any publications. ######################################## >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? > Caltech, EE, 3.2 (?) >How did you do on the GRE General? > M 800 > V 710 > A 800 >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? > 770/900 CS >Did you have any publications? journal? > No >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? > No (Computer Science) >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? > Boston U. (?) > U.C. Irvine, Ph.D. > Kansas State (?) > Purdue U. -- I'm not sure there is a difference > How about where I didn't get accepted: > CMU, Yale, Princeton, Cornell ######################################## Suggest you call the _departmental_ admissions officer, or the faculty chair of the dept's admissions committee, or that person's secretary, at schools you're particularly interested in, and just ask. Some schools may be constipated about giving out this information (though I don't see any valid reason why they should be); others may just not know offhand; but with luck (and some phone bills), you may get some reasonable answers. I asked this of an admissions officer for a particular undergrad program at Georgetown Univ recently, and got a straight answer. ######################################## > >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? > Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University B.S. Aerospace Engineering 3.23 / 4.00 > >How did you do on the GRE General? > M 800/800 > V 720/800 > A 800/800 > > >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? > Engineering 800 (no specific max score, somewhere in the 900s) > >Did you have any publications? journal? > Not that I'd want anyone to read. > >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? > No. > >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? > University of Michigan M.S. program in Aerospace Engineering > ######################################## You have not listed the most important things of all - sex and, most important, race. Some schools, particularly Berkeley, weight race high enough that little else counts if that is right. ######################################## > Just exactly what are good grades, good GRE scores, etc? I would like > specific numbers for these quantities. >>>> Some questions: Here are my replies: Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? Arizona State University B.S.E. Computer Systems Engineering 3.90/4.00 overall How did you do on the GRE General? M 800 V 720 A 800 How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? Computer Science, 840 (99th percentile) (I will make a note here. The score ranges for subject tests vary widely. On the computer science test, the published range goes up to 860. 840 and 860 are listed as the 99th percentile. The Mathematics test, on the other hand, is much "easier". I believe 6% of those who take the test receive the top possible score, a 1000 (i.e., 1000 is the 94th percentile -- at least when I took the tests about 1.5 years ago). Other tests have other score ranges. You can make comparisons between tests based only on percentiles. However, for the same subject tests, the scores should not vary much from year to year, unless they change the "difficulty" of the test.) Did you have any publications? journal? No publications. Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were applying? No real research work. Spent all summers working industry jobs. Here is where I really failed. I was always too shy to get involved or "create trouble" for professors. Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? I am still attending Arizona State University, in the MS/PhD program in computer science. I did apply to several other schools, like MIT, Stanford, etc. I wasn't accepted in any of those schools. I did, however, get an NSF Graduate Fellowship in Mathematics/CS (which I believe is about as hard as being admitted to any of those schools). I believe my GPA/GRE scores were in the acceptable ranges for any of those schools. I attribute my rejection to (a) having no research experience (b) getting letters of recommendation from professors who knew my work, instead of those who came from big-name schools (c) perhaps my undergraduate institution (d) and most probably my very poorly defined goals. I would recommend that you contact professors in the fields you are interested in and make sure that you come across as having a good idea of what you want to research. I still am struggling with this problem. There are too many interesting subjects, and I'm afraid of "missing my calling." ######################################## > >Just exactly what are good grades, good GRE scores, etc? I would like >specific numbers for these quantities. > Depends upon school and depoartment... > >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? > Did my undergrad here at Michigan GPA 3.45 in Computer Engineering..... >How did you do on the GRE General? > M 760 > V 480 (never did well on verbal parts..) > A 720 > > >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? > did not take it > >Did you have any publications? journal? > Nope... > >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? > > Worked for IBM for a summer --- >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? > > I got into Michigan and Illinois -- rejected by Ohio State (Which doesn't make any sense to me sine UM is better than OSU and Illinois is better than both in COmputer Engin... at each school I got into the grad program -- I'm only going for an MS, but there is nothing really stopping me from continuing on for the long haul... some people claim that you should say that you are going for a PHD on the application --- BUT a memebr of the selection committe here says that 90% of the decisions are made on raw scores (here at Michigan we also take into consideration undergrad school a 3.0 at MIT is worth more than a 3.0 at lets say Western Michigan) ######################################## Where did you get your degree? Dartmouth, AB mathematics, GPA = 3.67 GRE: M=800, V=790, A=800 subject Math=960 No publications, no journals, no real experience with CS (I was a high school teacher) Accepted Duke PhD, UNC (masters), CMU PhD You can use the information anonymously Things were different 6 years ago when I applied --- the competition was less fierce than it is now. ######################################## I am not sure whether the Deptt. of Computer Science at Univ. of Nebraska sends you that kind of information. But the graduation requirements in this deptt. include a score of 65-%ile on GRE (CS) for Master's and they do not allow you to take Ph.D. comps. unless you can show a score of 75-%ile or better on the same exam. We have been asking them to make it an admission requirement rather than a graduation requirement and they are seriously looking into it. >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? B.S. (Comp. Sc. Engg.) from M.N.R. Engg. College, Allahabad, India (First div. with Honors) M.S. (Comp. Sc.) from Univ. of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR (GPA 4.0/4.0) >How did you do on the GRE General? > M: 770 > V: 580 > A: 640 >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? Computer Science, 88-%ile >Did you have any publications? journal? 3 publications before joining the Ph.D. program >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? Worked for three years as a Real-time Applications Engineer in Engineers India Limited, New Delhi (a leading Consultancy Corp. in South Asia, formerly Bechtel India) >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? Department of Computer Science, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE Ph.D. ######################################## >My problem: I do not want to send an application, and an application >fee, to a school I have no chance of being admitted to. With the proper >guidence, I can save myself time and money, not to mention the people I >ask to write my recommendations. There appear to be even greater cultural differences between the US and UK than I had previously thought; none of the British Universities charge application fees. How much do American Universities charge a potential student to apply? Have you ever thought of applying to a non-US University? An American friend told me that her fees studying for a PhD here in Cambridge were less than a third of what she had been quoted in the US, yet she believes the teaching standard to be much higher here. I considered studying at MIT but my previous employer (a major US electronics company) suggested that they would value a British PhD more highly than one from any of the leading American Universities. ######################################## >Just exactly what are good grades, good GRE scores, etc? I would like >specific numbers for these quantities. This is a very difficult question since I believe that the selection process is much more subjective than one would like to believe. However, your concerns with saving money and time are very valid. From personal experience, I did extremely well on my GRE's however, I was accepted to graduate school before they even received these grades. The only reason that they wanted these scores was to see how they compared to others. The GRE's are the only "standard" among schools. (since everyone takes the same test.) This becomes very apparent when you look at MY scores. I was an engineering major at Dartmouth but received a higher verbal score than math score! Something wrong with this picture???? Not really when you consider that Dartmouth is a liberal arts school. I would venture to guess that this type of scoring would be very unusual for an MIT student. It is ironic that the following questions that you ask, essentially answer your own questions. They are exactly the questions that graduate schools ask about their applicants. I have assigned a number next to each question that indicates my perception of how important graduate schools think each of these questions are. Of course, these are MY opinions.... >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? (#3) Dartmouth BA 3.2 >How did you do on the GRE General? (#4) M 680 V 720 A 800 >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? (#5) I didn't take a subject test. >Did you have any publications? journal? (#2) Yes American Journal of Plasma Physics >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? (#1) Yes (I believe that this is THE MOST important thing that graduate schools look at. You have already proven that you can do higher-level academic work, what graduate schools are looking for is someone who can contribute to the institution. It is important thing to remember that the main purpose of graduate schools is research (not academics) therefore someone who will add something to this facet is desirable. >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? Thayer School of Engineering ME ######################################## I think that your effort to collect information about what grades, GRE scores you need a different schools is doomed to failure. You certainly won't get enough replies to have any confidence in your results -- you might hear from a marginal student a school A, a top student at school B, etc., and conclude falsely that schools B is harder to get into that school A. Here are some other sources of information: write to the departments you're interested in -- they might have statistics compiled these data (we don't, BTW). Telephone the department your interested in, and talk to somebody invovled in gradaute admissions. They're not going to tell you whether you're admitted on the spot, but they might be willing to tell you if you're wasting your money applying. Here's my main suggestion: talk to somebody who knows these things. A faculty member at your undergraduate school is an obvious choice. If he or she has much experience with these things, they ought to be able to tell you which schools you should apply to. They also ought to be able to help you choose a school that's appropriate for your academic interests. Good luck, ######################################## Grades: 3.5 Overall 3.7 In my major GPA: I. General M: 800 V: 550 (a guess..) A: 800 II. Subject Physics: 820 (So I didn't study, sue me!) Publication: None at the time I applied for grad school. (NOTE: After my first publication, I was able to get in touch with the admission offices and have my publication listed in my application.) National Finalists, Apple Computer's "Design a Personal Computer for the Year 2000" contest (1 of 5). Research Experience: Plasma Simulation and Theory Group, UC Berkeley, June 1989-Present Schools Applied (and accepted): Princeton UCLA UCSD ######################################## > >Just exactly what are good grades, good GRE scores, etc? I would like >specific numbers for these quantities. > >I am in the process of applying to graduate school. After speaking (esp. >over the net) to numerous people, I am slightly confused on what is good, >great, excellent, etc. > >My problem: I do not want to send an application, and an application >fee, to a school I have no chance of being admitted to. With the proper >guidence, I can save myself time and money, not to mention the people I >ask to write my reccommendations. > >I have received information from several schools. Only UC Berkeley was >kind enough to list the average GPA and average GRE score of those applying >and those admitted. I found this information helpful because I now know >what ranges they are looking for in incoming applicants. This approach >contrasted with the other phases such as "outstanding students", "highly >qualified", "good GRE scores", "excellent grades", etc which do not really >help anyone but the people collecting the application fee. > > Most `top' schools don't care much about the GRE if you have good grades (> 3.5 in major) and good recommendations (top 5 or 10 %). If you have a paper or two, you can be confident of getting into at least a couple of the `top' universities. >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India; Bachelor of Technology in Electronics Engineering; 8.5/10.0(roughly 3.5/4.0) > >How did you do on the GRE General? M-790(97%) V-690(94%) A-760(97%) > > >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? Engineering-860(97%) In my opinion, this doesn't really matter > >Did you have any publications? journal? A technical report based on my undergraduate project work > >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? Yes, 5 courses, 1 lab and undergraduate project work > >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? Purdue-PhD in EE(research assistantship) Minnesota-PhD in EE(research assistantship) Notre Dame-PhD in EE(research assistantship) Syracuse-PhD in Solid State Science(graduate fellowship) North Carolina State-MS in EE(teaching assistantship) > ######################################## In comp.edu you write: >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? Muskingum College (small liberal arts school in Ohio) BS in Math & CS GPA 3.81 > > >How did you do on the GRE General? > M 740 > V 710 > A 790 > > >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? > Yes, CS score 650 > >Did you have any publications? journal? > Yes, 1 in Parallel Computing > >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? > Yes, less than two years research & work exp. at Argonne Nat. Lab. > >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? > NYU, Colorado St., Ohio St. all PhD (I ended up choosing OSU because of $$) > ######################################## I saw your posting on soc.college. I have just completed the grad school application process. Hope this info helps. >>>> Some questions: Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? MIT, S.B., 4.75 How did you do on the GRE General? M 800 V 630 A 780 How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? EE hmmm... I think like 600 or so. CS 800 Did you have any publications? journal? no Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were applying? My research experience consists of my bachelors thesis and four years at HP's ESL (engineering systems lab) designing VLSI for HP-PA processors. I mostly design caches. My area of interest, by the way, is CAD for VLSI and processors. Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? School/dept Yale EE accepted for PhD and got money Carnegie-Mellon ECE accepted for PhD and got money Univ of Illinois ECE accepted for PhD and got money Stanford EE accepted for MS, no money Berkeley EE not accepted MIT EECS not accepted NSF Fellowship honorable mention "Got money" means I got a research assistantship which pays tuition plus a stipend of about $1000 per month. ######################################## Call or email graduate secretaries/director of graduate advisors for last year's admission information might be a better way. You may get some information not available from application packet. ######################################## Well, in any case I've given my particulars below. I would like to get some feed back also. So can you please collect all the responses you get and mail me a copy. Thanks. >>>>> Some questions: >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? From a top rated instituition in India (RECT). We don't have a GPA system, but I guess my grade would have been equivalent to an A to an A- >How did you do on the GRE General? > M > V > A I don't remember the individual scores. The total was 2060/2400 I've heard that a combine V + Q >= 1400 is good. >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? Computer Science = 91% >Did you have any publications? journal? Nope. >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? Sort of. I worked on my under-graduate project at a defence R&D establishment in India. >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? At present MS. ######################################## I just went through the admissions process. A few things you might want to know: Berkeley is considered a tough school but easier to get into than Stanford, CMU, and MIT. Therefore, Stanford and CMU would probably expect as high or higher GRE scores than UCB (assuming they consider GRE scores important). MIT does not use GRE scores. I heard they found they were INVERSELY correlated with research ability. CMU has a very easy application to their School of Computer Science and no application fee. (I assume you're interested in Computer Science. You didn't say.) >>>>> Some questions: >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? MIT, SB (Bachelor's), 4.9 (4.8 at time of application)/5. >How did you do on the GRE General? > M 800 > V 780 > A 790 >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? CS 99% >Did you have any publications? journal? No >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? Four summers of industry jobs, plus undergraduate research experience. I know at MIT that they value academic research that leads to recommendations from professors much more than industrial work. >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? PhD: MIT, CMU, UCB, Stanford ######################################### This should give you an idea of the experience I have had in the last six+ months in applying for grad school programs (computer science). I will be attending UC San Diego in the Fall. > [ stuff ] >help anyone but the people collecting the application fee. > > >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? University of Washington (BS comp sci, 1989). GPA: ~3.4 Note: One thing that may have been in my favor is that I did very well (3.7 or higher) in some CS courses that may be considered "hard" -- Theory of Automata, Theory of Algorithms, Operating Systems -- this may have helped me since my over-all gpa is kind of unspectacular. > > >How did you do on the GRE General? Actual scores are very close, but I won't guarentee them -- I am pretty sure about my percentiles though (I don't have my score sheet with me). > M ~780 (94th percentile). > V ~690 (very unsure about this score, but I am sure that my percentile was 89). > A ~770 (98th percentile). > > >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? Don't remember score, but I was at the 76th percentile. (Note: Pretty hard test. I think the deviation is pretty high -- a couple of questions can change your score a lot. Also, most departments I spoke with said that they didn't take this test very seriously. I also took it the same day as the general which probably wasn't a great idea.) >Did you have any publications? journal? NO. >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? NO, but some industry experience. >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? I applied to PhD programs at all schools, but I asked that I be considered for their masters program is rejected for PhD. Accepted: University of Colorado (Boulder), University of Arizona, UC San Diego (PhD program at all). Rejected: University of Washington, University of British Columbia. Notes: Don't underestimate the value of good professor recommendations. I had two from professors and one from an old boss. I have heard that a lot of admissions committees (sp) don't take industry recommendations seriously -- go for professors if you are pretty sure they will be favorable. Also, I have a hunch that a pretty specific "letter of intent" can help -- tell them what you are interested in and what you might like to do research in (you just might get professors in your area (which of course you don't need to be committed to) pushing for your admission so they can get you on one of their research projects). I think there is a lot of "cronyism" in the academic world and the set of "distinguished CS professors" is really pretty small -- ie they all know each other. Regrets: I kind of wish I had applied to UCLA for the hell of it and I might have been a bit too closed minded in only applying to west coast schools. Suggestions: Pester the departments after you have applied. Talk to professors if you can, so they know you are *very* interested in attending their school. If you are admitted to a couple of schools, you may be able to use funding you have received at one school to "encourage" funding from another school. I really think the phone calls are worth it (try email too) -- they were for me. If you really want to go to a certain school, but don't *think* you will get in, I would say to go ahead and apply. You may lose $30, but it may be the best $30 you will ever spend and I am pretty sure that more often than not the selection process is very subjective (read unpredictable). ######################################### > >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? A small liberal arts school, B.S. in C.S., 3.7 > >How did you do on the GRE General? > M 720 > V 650 > A 750 > >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? 29%. CS. >Did you have any publications? journal? No. >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? Some work experience, but no research >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? I got turned down for a Rutgers MS. I am planning on applying to less competitive schools which apparently accept anyone with above a 3.0 GPA. I would like to add some comments. Although I had a reasonably high GPA, reasonably good general GRE scores, and had my company paying for me, I still got turned down by a university which is probably not even in the league of the schools you are planning to apply to. I see that you are working at HP right now. I have no idea if you are a summer student still in school, or you've been out for quite a while. If you are still in school, you may be ok, but if you've been out for a while, study as hard as possible for those subject GREs! I had been out of school for 4 years, and had forgotten much of what I had learned in college. Rutgers tends to downplay all of this in the catalog. The only thing that they emphasize is your undergraduate curriculum. After I applied, I found out that the average subject score was about 70%! If I had known this, I probably would have either studied endlessly for the subject test, or not have bothered to apply at all! Sometimes I think by not making this information more readily available, schools simply want to collect money from people that don't even come close to meeting their standards. Also, I think that the school you attended makes a large difference. If you attended either an Ivy League or very well respected state school, you will have a much better chance of being accepted. If you are planning on attending the same school that you attended as an undergraduate, you will probably be accepted, although there are exceptions such as MIT. In conclusion, unless your record is almost perfect, it comes down to a crapshoot. You may have a better essay than someone else, and therefore will be accepted. I think that publications only really count for the PhD programs. Also, if you are planning to apply for a doctorate, it really helps if there is a faculty member with the same research interest as you. In any case, if you don't get accepted by any big name universities, there are still other ok schools you can attend. I'm planning on applying to NJIT now. I feel much confident about gaining admission to NJIT, as they report what GPA they desire and what GRE scores they require for bridge applicants right on the application! I don't even need to report my GRE scores, but I figure I may as well since I've already taken the GREs and my combined score is about 500 points above their minimum! Good luck, and remember to start applying as early as possible! ######################################### >Just exactly what are good grades, good GRE scores, etc? I would like >specific numbers for these quantities. >My problem: I do not want to send an application, and an application >fee, to a school I have no chance of being admitted to. With the proper >guidence, I can save myself time and money, not to mention the people I >ask to write my reccommendations. Hmmmmmm. I narrowed my choices down to MIT CMU and Gatech after several months of looking through infor for the very reasons you cite. (I actually was going to apply to Stanford, but after I saw that the application was almost a ridiculous as MIT's, I didn't even apply.) Mit's fee is 45, Tech's 15, CMU's 0. >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? Undergrad: Ga Tech. BS, Computer Science. 3.9 (overall), 4.0 (major) >How did you do on the GRE General? >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? V 720 (96%-tile) Q 770 (94) A 770 (97) CS subject 740 (88) The percentile's are all that's important. In the book that they give you they list the scores and the corresponding percentiles. Score in the 90's and your score won't even matter. It all becomes and issue of everything else (See below). All this was meaningless to MIT--EE/CS doesn't consider GRE scores. >Did you have any publications? journal? Two history/psychology papers that were being used by groups outside of the normal journals. I don't know whether it helped or not. >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? 4 years of summer working experience. I was going to have some research experience immediately after the time I applied. I did have some experience on academic committees and MOST IMPORTANTLY I had good people writing my recommendations. And I think I wrote an original statement of interest. (Or maybe not :-) >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? accepted at MIT, CMU, GaTech. Going to MIT for the eventual PhD. Sure. I don't care. Beyond all this, I think test scores are used as a cutoff thing to prune away a lot of applicants. Beyond some minimum number, it's the recommendations, your statement, and all those wonderful extracurricular things that you did that get you in. ######################################## >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? Virginia Tech, electrical engineering, 3.6 > >How did you do on the GRE General? > M 800 > V 600 > A 800 (all were right on the 100 mark - i.e. the above is not an approximation) > >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? 970, Math >Did you have any publications? journal? No, unless you count winning 2nd prize on the IEEE Student Paper Contest >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? Did an undergraduate thesis, but nothing else >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (either PhD or MS), rejected by MIT and CMU ######################################## > >Just exactly what are good grades, good GRE scores, etc? I would like >specific numbers for these quantities. There's no such thing as a good score, only a bad score. A bad score is anything under 550 on any section of the General GRE. >My problem: I do not want to send an application, and an application >fee, to a school I have no chance of being admitted to. With the proper >guidence, I can save myself time and money, not to mention the people I >ask to write my reccommendations. Hey, you have to take chances in life, so why not now? Let me tell you that a school ranked #66 rejected me while one ranked #19 accepted me. Your personal statement has A LOT to do with it. >I have received information from several schools. Only UC Berkeley was >kind enough to list the average GPA and average GRE score of those applying >and those admitted. I found this information helpful because I now know >what ranges they are looking for in incoming applicants. This approach >contrasted with the other phases such as "outstanding students", "highly >qualified", "good GRE scores", "excellent grades", etc which do not really >help anyone but the people collecting the application fee. Berkeley isn't helping you. They're being asses. They're trying to scare off anyone who doesn't fit their "image" of a perfect grad student. >>>>> Some questions: > >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? BA, Boston Univ. GPA: 3.52 MA, Boston Univ. GPA: 3.75 (I got both at the same time and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.) >How did you do on the GRE General? M: 730 V: ha ha ha (under 600; I didn't take the V seriously) A: 610 (this, I took as a joke as well) >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? CS: too mediocre to mention >Did you have any publications? journal? Nope, unless you count the programming article I wrote for COMPUTE magazine back in 1985 (my first nationwide-published article at the age of 17). >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? I wrote a senior thesis for distinction in my field. I also worked for Infocom (y'know, the place that makes all those great adventure games). >Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? Univ. of Penn Ph.D. ######################################## >Just exactly what are good grades, good GRE scores, etc? I would like >specific numbers for these quantities. Will you post your results, or at least mail me a copy, please? >>>> Some questions: >Where did you get your undergraduate degree? degree? GPA? B.S. in Computer Science from Brigham Young University. GPA 3.87/4.0. >How did you do on the GRE General? M 800 V 750 A 800 >How did you do on the GRE Subject? Which subject? Computer Science - 92nd percentile. I don't remember the exact score. >Did you have any publications? journal? no. >Did you have any research or work experience in the field for which you were >applying? Internships - Hewlett-Packard Company Digital Communications Associates, Inc. Research Assistant - at school, part time. Teaching Assistant - at school, part time. Math Lab Assistant - at school, part time. Where did you get accepted for graduate school? Phd or MS? Georgia Institute of Technology - PhD, with a President's Fellowship. Brigham Young University - PhD, also on a fellowship. (I didn't take it.) - but I didn't even get IN to Carnegie Mellon. Who can figure? maybe I needed the publications.