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I think most of us can attest to the dread of the GRE and the weight given to this particular piece of criteria in the admissions process for graduate school. With several doctoral programs within the applied fields of psychology, every school operates differently in terms of admissions. Given this, I can personally vouch for a handful of schools in Texas (in particular, North Texas) that explicitly utilize the GRE as the first criteria to weed out applicants to ultimately decide who will be placed in the Excel spreadsheet that will eventually pass in front of faculty members/ admissions committee. While most websites will provide a disclaimer on the variation of "we do not automatically dismiss applicants based on any one criteria," it is counter intuitive to proclaim this idea while dismissing applicants from being considered based on probably the most notorious criteria of all, the GRE.
My question becomes; Do you have personal experience with programs that utilize this approach? For faculty or admissions committee members: Do you review every applicant, or is it already condensed prior to getting the "spreadsheet" (or any other form of aggregation)?
Possibly it could be isolated to types of fields (i.e. microbiology vs. psychology, etc.), my husband had applied to UTSW's Ph.D. in Microbiology a couple of years ago and was ultimately denied admissions, to gain feedback for future applications we asked the administrator some of the reasons why he was denied. The very first thing she had mentioned was that they had utilized the GRE to weed out applicants before they ever constructed an Excel spreadsheet to pass to faculty members. After that, I realized that was pretty unfair to proclaim one statement yet the actions displayed were the opposite. If in fact he had a "holistic" chance in evaluation, they would have seen his professorships, publications, conferences, GPA, advanced degrees and advanced coursework taken. Due to the GRE criteria, not one faculty member saw him, his name did not get placed on the spreadsheet.
This post is not intended for a GRE debate, mostly, it is to gain insight into people's personal experiences, to gain knowledge about programs that operate like this. In particular, I think input from fellow faculty or admissions committee members would be very helpful.
My question becomes; Do you have personal experience with programs that utilize this approach? For faculty or admissions committee members: Do you review every applicant, or is it already condensed prior to getting the "spreadsheet" (or any other form of aggregation)?
Possibly it could be isolated to types of fields (i.e. microbiology vs. psychology, etc.), my husband had applied to UTSW's Ph.D. in Microbiology a couple of years ago and was ultimately denied admissions, to gain feedback for future applications we asked the administrator some of the reasons why he was denied. The very first thing she had mentioned was that they had utilized the GRE to weed out applicants before they ever constructed an Excel spreadsheet to pass to faculty members. After that, I realized that was pretty unfair to proclaim one statement yet the actions displayed were the opposite. If in fact he had a "holistic" chance in evaluation, they would have seen his professorships, publications, conferences, GPA, advanced degrees and advanced coursework taken. Due to the GRE criteria, not one faculty member saw him, his name did not get placed on the spreadsheet.
This post is not intended for a GRE debate, mostly, it is to gain insight into people's personal experiences, to gain knowledge about programs that operate like this. In particular, I think input from fellow faculty or admissions committee members would be very helpful.