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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Depends on field. I can't believe nobody mentioned GRE or other relevant exam. At my "very good" state school we immediately delete any applicant who scores below the 97th or so percentile. Also, math and stats grades are extremely important if the area is at all quantitative (even psychology does a lot of data-heavy work these days). Communication ability also important. Prior research experience a plus. Rec letters come next. Undergrad school least important of all factors, at least for our program. We barely look at it.[/quote]

Except many schools are still not requiring GRE’s. [/quote]

Which is why this PP’s response is suspect and the other two researchers ring true. Even in their heyday, standardized test scores didn’t have this much impact. [/quote]

You can call my post suspect but I am indeed a tenured professor at an R1 university who is in charge of PhD admissions in our department and we do NOT have test optional admissions. There is no way to standardize intelligence across applicants without *ahem* STANDARDIZED tests. It is the most critical weed out tool that we have when trying to get from 100 applicants down to 2-3 admits [/quote]

I'm the STEM prof who said GRE wasn't highly important in our admissions--we are not test optional though. The GRE just isn't that great of an indicator --the math on it is high school math--it's much more telling how someone did in differential equations--and what their work says about their ability to apply relevant math knowledge-- than how well they remember their high school geometry. 
 Most of our students do score very high on the test, but some of our best students did not.  I think a cut off would waste a lot of great potential in favor of some people who are too focused on the map, and not enough on the territory so to speak.  Now a low score would be one of the "alarm bells" I mentioned--and that for us is the main function of the GRE.  If someone is acing standardized math courses like CalcIII/Diff-Eq/ and quant heavy chem courses but has a low quant score, I worry about cheating/fraud in the application and investigate more closely.  If someone has a low verbal score, it's usually because they are a non-native speaker and the GRE is catching gaps the TOEFL/other language tests don't. That can matter since you it can take nuanced verbal skills to understand and communicate scientific research.

We are a larger inter-disciplinary department and have funding for more than 2-3 PhD candidates a year though so we don't need to cull the applications quite the same automatic way.  [/quote]

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