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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's not really about overall GPA because they don't care about your grades in unrelated classes at all. [/quote]

Not true, actually (department chair).  Very low grades in non-major courses can show not only skill gaps, but also an unwillingness to work hard at that which is more difficult or uninteresting.  Also, someone who wants access to the highest levels of scholarship but demonstrably does not value the chance to learn (or at least the obligation to be responsible) in a non-major context might not fit in well in graduate school, where you have to be willing and able to do a lot of things you might not personally care about or be interested in.  I'm not talking here about a kid with As in the major and Bs in other courses - we sometimes see applications from candidates with A minuses and Bs in the major and Cs and Ds (and even Fs) in some of the other courses.  Needless to say, we are not excited about that.[/quote]

I do doc admissions for our department/school and would generally agree with this.  Obviously, the higher the GPA the better but that depends a lot on major-- engineering depts just grade lower than many humanities dept.  Obviously, the faculty doing admissions will know the norms of the field but it could become an issue if the student majored in, say, engineering but is pursuing a PhD in a field with more grade inflation.

The thing with doctoral admissions is that it's often done simply by faculty in the school of admissions and not a professional admissions staff, so you're at the mercy of those faculty members' preferences and knowledge (and biases).  I've been in admissions meetings where a faculty member in a very quantitative dept couldn't care less about grades or GRE scores in qualitative areas and indeed fought the other committee members who pointed out large deficiencies in those areas.  And I've seen the converse (faculty member in more qualitative fields making the case to look past low math/statistics grades on the notion that they don't matter for the type of research the student would be doing).  BUT I've also seen the opposite philosophy (different years and different committee membership) where it was understood that good candidates would be good in all areas.  I've also seen some committees where people generally wanted applicants to have a masters (not required, but clearly preferred given the discussions that took place) and other committees where folks were happy to bring in students just finishing undergrad  So it's a bit of a crap shoot.  The same university/school with a strong preference one year could have almost the opposite preference the next year because admissions committees change over time.  The one thing that was consistent (but this is probably field specific-- I'm in a field where we admit a relatively small number of students each year--students who reached out to faculty to discuss the program, demonstrate their passion, and make it clear that they knew what a PhD would entail did much better than students who simply filled out the formal application.

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