Berkeley Dropping The GRE

[Alpha]

Most departments are dropping the GRE requirement.
Most Berkeley departments drop GRE requirement (insidehighered.com)

[ashkir]

Good. These tests are stupid judges of character and skill and are all about whether or not you conformed to a single idea.

[ReyMysterioso]

I never understood the point of the GRE. If 13 years of public school, SATs, ACTs, ASVABs, LEAP exams and 120+ credits worth of college aren't enough to figure out a person can learn, what's one extra test supposed to prove?

[freeloader]

I never understood the point of the GRE. If 13 years of public school, SATs, ACTs, ASVABs, LEAP exams and 120+ credits worth of college aren't enough to figure out a person can learn, what's one extra test supposed to prove?

I did grad school (in history) at a couple of fairly prominent universities. I asked the graduate directors at each of the schools and they said that pretty much the same thing. They both said that the GRE served as an indicator of people who likely couldn’t do graduate work but had managed to hide that fact during their undergraduate. They didn’t care if you had a good, really good, or great GRE. They just didn’t want to see a bad GRE. They said it could be useful in evaluating people who changed fields. I went to school with some STEM+business undergrads who were studying the history of some STEM field or a business field. Of course, they tended to blow the math part out of the water, but could they string a sentence together.  GRE helped show they could. One of them mentioned that GRE can be especially useful for STEM programs where you need to be able to write in a way that you might not as a STEM undergrad.  Both of them made the point that they tried to evaluate people holistically. They looked at grades, the school you attended, recommendations, writing samples, etc, and the GRE. 

I freely admit my sample size of 2 program directors is tiny, but I suspect most programs/universities use the GRE in more or less the same way. 

I suspect most programs at Berkeley won’t miss a beat by dropping the GRE. They have enough, different data points on which to evaluate people.  

If schools are using low GREs as a way of excluding people and assuming they have more than enough qualified applicants, one wonders what criteria will essentially replace the GRE. Will this end up hurting people who graduated from tiny, poorly ranked schools?  Berkeley knows what it means to graduate with a 3.8 from Harvard, but what does it mean to graduate with a 3.8 from a tiny school that nobody has ever heard of in a rural part of flyover country?  Maybe you as an admissions officer decide to make an offer to that person from the tiny school BECAUSE you have never heard of their school, or maybe you offer the person from Harvard because they are a “safer” investment.

[nomaduser]

GRE is a good exam though. It helps you practice writing and vocab. I'm still taking GRE to increase my chance of getting accepted.

[sanantone]

This is good for people who are poor test takers, but it introduces more subjectivity into the process. It also means that, if you received poor grades in high school or undergrad for personal reasons and not because of aptitude, you're pretty much screwed and will have to settle for open admissions programs.

I expect selective universities that are dropping the GRE to start factoring in the difficulty of the major and the reputation of the college instead of solely relying upon GPA. That will lead to other types of discrimination.

[Old Guy]

The whole point has nothing to do with academics.  The GRE provides a reasonably blind comparison of student ability when they come from dissimilar backgrounds.  The point of getting rid of the GRE is to allow schools to discriminate and be less obvious.  They don't want to be sued like Harvard for punting Asian students.  Universities used to discriminate to keep down the number of Jewish students.  Bob Dylan was wrong when he said, "The Times they are a changin."  The targets change but the idiots in charge of the asylum simply want to retain the ability to discriminate. Did I say that?

[asianphd]

While I am neutral on whether universities should drop the general GRE or not, I disagree if GRE Physics and GRE Maths dropped too. They are clearly an indicator that would help me, as an international student, to get entry into a more prestigious university in the USA. Of course, other factors play a role as well, like research experience, LoR, etc. But GRE Physics and Maths are standardized and serve as a good comparison.

[bjcheung77]

So many variables are in play when admissions look into applicants to see if they meet the majority of the requirements or exceed them. The GRE is just one item in a list of many, I wouldn't worry too much for those selective schools that continue to take GRE scores, those who don't are making it a tad easier to take a look at other criteria. The weighting scale changes minorly, other than that, I don't see an upside to this except for the lower cost of applying to semi competitive or selective schools now...

[sanantone]

The whole point has nothing to do with academics.  The GRE provides a reasonably blind comparison of student ability when they come from dissimilar backgrounds.  The point of getting rid of the GRE is to allow schools to discriminate and be less obvious.  They don't want to be sued like Harvard for punting Asian students.  Universities used to discriminate to keep down the number of Jewish students.  Bob Dylan was wrong when he said, "The Times they are a changin."  The targets change but the idiots in charge of the asylum simply want to retain the ability to discriminate.  Did I say that?

I guess one could argue that this has always been about protecting seats for non-Jewish White students, but Ivy Plus schools are already doing this by favoring legacy applicants, athletes (most of which are not Black at Ivy Plus schools), children of employees, and children of wealthy donors. Harvard won their case, by the way. If the Ivy Plus schools were to admit students based on merit, alone, the majority of seats that would open up for Asian students would come from White applicants who would have been admitted otherwise. This can be seen in the University of California system where Asian students are far overrepresented based on their percentage of the general population because the UC system is more based on merit. White students are grossly underrepresented.