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
