I think that we all look at this issue from a personal perspective, especially those that did well on standardized tests, and I've had this same argument with colleagues for 30 years, including the exact same situation where the student was up for a competitive assistantship with a mediocre GRE score and a senior-authored publication in an international journal. You don't tell us how low the score was and I'd be concerned if it was a low quantitative score, because grad students need to have a good quantitative background. But for researchers, publications are the sine quo non and render a low GRE score moot, provided the student actually earned the senior authorship (we don't have that info either and I view senior authorship differently than junior authorship, especially if there are more than two authors). The one valid argument that the "keepers of the gates" regarding the GRE is that it is the one evaluator that is equivalent across all applications,i.e., as faculty we don't have the time to evaluate if an A at Furman University is the equivalent of an A at Chapel Hill. But in the end I've found that the GRE isn't very indicative of performance by a researcher (I mean really, how could it be, it contains no information on motivation, persistence, intuition or many other characteristics that great researchers have). In fact, I've seen some of the biggest flops as graduate students come from students with very high GRE scores --- they just happen to be good at taking standardized tests but not necessarily at research. My own story -- I took the GRE in 1975 and earned somewhere between 1150 and 1190 can't remember exactly, but I do remember it was a mediocre score. I have 110+ journal articles, including multiple papers in Am. Nat, Ecology, Ecol. Monogr, Oecologia, Freshwater Biol. etc. The math is pretty easy to do <g>. cheers, g2
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 2:03 PM, Alex M. L <[email protected]> wrote: > Last weekend I got into a long discussion on the value of GRE score in a > PhD > student. As the 2015 applicants start, I open up the discussion to the > community: > > I have a female student that has both a Masters (thesis) and publication > with > several years research experience. However, her GRE score are quite poor. > Should I really pass up a seemingly great applicant because of low scores? > > If a student has a biology Masters or a publication... do GRE scores > matter? > Have we not moved past GRE scores when picking the next round of PhD > researchers for our lab(s)? > > If you have a personal story of low scores and still attaining your PhD or > accepting a similar student... I would love to hear from you! > > Cheers! > Alex M.L > -- Gary D. Grossman, PhD Professor of Animal Ecology Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources University of Georgia Athens, GA, USA 30602 Research http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gary_Grossman Board of Editors - Animal Biodiversity and Conservation Editorial Board - Freshwater Biology Editorial Board - Ecology Freshwater Fish Sculpture by Gary D. Grossman https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gary-Grossmans-Sculpture-Portfolio/124819124227147?fref=ts Hutson Gallery Provincetown, MA - www.hutsongallery.net/artists.html My ukulele channel - www.youtube.com/user/garydg29
