Does GRE weigh heavy on admissions?

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It's different for each school. Most of the schools I applied to weigh the GRE as equally as important as your overall and prereq gpa, but there are plenty of schools that put very little importance to it, some even requiring the bare minimum to be competent. What did you get on your GRE? And what schools are you looking to apply to?
 
Pinesfootball said:
It's different for each school. Most of the schools I applied to weigh the GRE as equally as important as your overall and prereq gpa, but there are plenty of schools that put very little importance to it, some even requiring the bare minimum to be competent. What did you get on your GRE? And what schools are you looking to apply to?
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I am applying to most of the schools in FL (nOVA, u OF miami, uf, unf, St. Aug. UAB, Alabama State, and random LLU. I have not taken the GRE yet but I might be expecting the worst on the math portion.
 
I am under the impression that it certainly does not make up for lower GPAs. Science coursework grades are more indicative of your performance in the program than a standardized test. I received a 162/161/5.0 and was not accepted anywhere last year. I am hoping that will change this year, but bottom line, GPA is king.
 
situational said:
I am under the impression that it certainly does not make up for lower GPAs. Science coursework grades are more indicative of your performance in the program than a standardized test. I received a 162/161/5.0 and was not accepted anywhere last year. I am hoping that will change this year, but bottom line, GPA is king.
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What was your stats?
 
In my experience, GRE was just as important as GPA. But don't let random people on the Internet make your decision, call the schools and ask them. They are happy to give more information
 
bnwj89 said:
In my experience, GRE was just as important as GPA. But don't let random people on the Internet make your decision, call the schools and ask them. They are happy to give more information
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What a glorious answer. Agreed.
 
I agree with the above answers but at least try to make the minimum score. Last year I was under the 300 mark and was rejected from most schools and waitlisted by UF. Most schools want at least their bare minimum score to be met before they look at your application. It's just another way to weed people out since there are so few spots available.
 
Dragon416 said:
I am applying to most of the schools in FL (nOVA, u OF miami, uf, unf, St. Aug. UAB, Alabama State, and random LLU. I have not taken the GRE yet but I might be expecting the worst on the math portion.
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I applied to a few of the schools you did, and from my experience I know nova does a good job of looking into your application as a whole, as well as USA

bnwj89 said:
In my experience, GRE was just as important as GPA. But don't let random people on the Internet make your decision, call the schools and ask them. They are happy to give more information
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^^completely agree
 
GRE is a way to equal every out. thats why its a standardized test. take for example someone has a 3.8 GPA from an average school and another has a 3.4 from an amazing school. GRE is a way to see to see how the student really is when everyone is on the same level playing ground. also it is a way to predict how the student will do on boards. the school doesn't want to invest so much time if you don't do well on standardized test.
 
The GRE is a cutoff. It's a way to automatically eliminate applicants who don't meet a certain score. It says nothing about your potential to get accepted into a DPT program, much less perform as a licensed PT.

Kevin
 
As someone with a low GPA and high GRE score who's friends with someone with a high GPA and low GRE scores, I think Kevin's really gotten to the meat of it. It's a cut-off and generally not much more than that. I visited schools and emailed them and told them my situation - pretty much all of them said that that it's a factor but that GPA is a significantly larger factor or that as long as you have the minimum score on the GRE, they don't care what you got. For my friend's situation, she got rejected from every school she applied to and all of them told her that they wanted to take her but couldn't until she got her GRE score up to the minimum. She didn't, and is now reapplying. In reapplying, we both had to find schools that were exceptions to the rule. She had to find schools that had no minimum GRE or put no stock in it, I had to find schools that heavily weighed it. They exist, but they're not prominent.
 
I wish GRE scores were weighted more heavily 🙁 I have a very high GRE score (331/5.5) but merely a moderately competitive GPA (3.53/3.59 prereq). Have yet to get an acceptance, have an interview on Friday though. Good luck everyone!
 
hellohelloduh said:
I wish GRE scores were weighted more heavily 🙁 I have a very high GRE score (331/5.5) but merely a moderately competitive GPA (3.53/3.59 prereq). Have yet to get an acceptance, have an interview on Friday though. Good luck everyone!
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Hang in there! I have a much lower GPA and just got my second acceptance. If I can do it, so can you! 🙂
 
The GRE is a measured exam that schools mostly want to use as a benchmark of sorts. I would say they are overall less important then the pre-req grades but more important then cum-gpa. Realize though that they can act as a tiebreaker, I was rejected to one school because my GRE was not as high as the people i was competing with where more or less all was equal.
 
jchill09 said:
The GRE is a measured exam that schools mostly want to use as a benchmark of sorts. I would say they are overall less important then the pre-req grades but more important then cum-gpa. Realize though that they can act as a tiebreaker, I was rejected to one school because my GRE was not as high as the people i was competing with where more or less all was equal.
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I also agree with this. I see the GRE as more or less a tiebreaker. IMO, ScienceGPA/Experience is king. I'm not working for admissions (maybe in the future), but that's what I would mostly look at.
 
hellohelloduh said:
I wish GRE scores were weighted more heavily 🙁 I have a very high GRE score (331/5.5) but merely a moderately competitive GPA (3.53/3.59 prereq). Have yet to get an acceptance, have an interview on Friday though. Good luck everyone!
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in my opinion those are solid numbers....you will get in somewhere, you have better stats than me and I got 2 acceptances
 
NewTestament said:
The GRE is a cutoff. It's a way to automatically eliminate applicants who don't meet a certain score. It says nothing about your potential to get accepted into a DPT program, much less perform as a licensed PT.

Kevin
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That is not 100% accurate. Well not really. Most of the research has looked at passing NPTE, which is realistically argued can have nothing to do with performance as a PT. But since performance as a PT is hard to define (what is good, bad, etc), and you have to pass NPTE to become a licensed PT, it is a useful variable to analyze. And this (http://ptjournal.apta.org/content/87/9/1181.full) paper does show some association between verbal and quant GRE and passing NPTE. Not great, but neither does GPA. As chair of our admissions committee, I advocated for weighting GRE equally to overall GPA (we do not worry about pre req GPA too much since the correlation between overall and pre req GPA is so strong [r > 0.92] for our applicants, it is just measuring the same thing). And the reason I advocated for GRE is it is the one way we can compare 'apples with apples.' We are super flexible with school attended and major earned, and community college vs. univ for classes, that there is no way to compare them. So a standardized test allows us to rank people. We weight verbal GRE, quant GRE, and overall GPA not quite equally, but the GRE combined ends up being weighted more than overall GPA for our screening (pre interview). We include analytic GRE at a smaller weight since nothing has been published about it with PT students yet.
 
In my opinion it is better to have a higher GPA and a lower GRE than a high GRE and low GPA. What does that tell the admissions committee? It gives the impression you have a lot of great potential and are a smart candidate but you didn't work as hard as you could have in your pre-requisite classes.
 
I think it varies from person to person. I have a low GPA, both cumulative and science, a decent GRE, and have already gotten accepted somewhere, with more interviews to come. Clearly I didn't get these interviews based off of my grades, which leads me to assume that they really look at the applicant as a whole. Try to make your application impressive in other ways!
 
sunnyskies26 said:
I think it varies from person to person. I have a low GPA, both cumulative and science, a decent GRE, and have already gotten accepted somewhere, with more interviews to come. Clearly I didn't get these interviews based off of my grades, which leads me to assume that they really look at the applicant as a whole. Try to make your application impressive in other ways!
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I think some schools are better at that than others. I've gotten 3 acceptances and 4 rejections so far and I doubt it's a coincidence that my 3 acceptances were the only three schools I applied to that weren't on PTCAS. A lower volume of applications make it much easier to actually take the time to look at the whole application.
 
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