Gilgamushy

If you think you are going to do fine in the GRE verbal and analytical, I would not worry too much about the math, particularly since you have demonstrated that you can succeed in logic and other grad level courses and have been professionally engaged in your AOI. That WILL count for a lot if you highlight it strongly. I got a very mediocre GRE score in math (this was 11 years ago) but excelled in the verbal and got 6.0 in the analytical. Totally fine. And as I said, I was explicitly told by an admissions committee member GREs are not really a concern because they are not predictive of long-term performance in a grad program. Seriously. GREs don't track anything meaningful and committees know that. Your performance in logic, etc. will mitigate for a bad math score. The only way a bad math score is going to doom you is if the rest of your application looks very weak, in which case your weak application will already have doomed ypu. I can't emphasize enough how shocked I was last season to see people with far lower scores than I got on my GRE getting into top 10 programs. It's just not what departments care about. They care about, to be honest, where you went to school for your undergrad or MA and *WHO* is writing your letters of recommendation. It's brutally elitist in that regard. They care about the quality of your writing sample and how well you convey your research project and areas of interest in your SOP. Just do a killer good application dossier. Your math score will not be a problem because the rest of the application will show that the GRE score is an anomaly. People have bad days in the testing room. They flake out while taking the test. This happens. Committees just don't place much credence in these scores as being indicative of a person's philosophical aptitude. I swear, I hear faculty say these things all the time. I am applying for re-admission after a long hiatus away from my PhD program and I am expected by my department's committee to submit a full application dossier as if I were a brand new applicant. I freaked out when they asked for all that because I hadn't taken the GRE in 11 years and I don't want to have to learn how to do crap like solve simultaneous equations all over again at the age of freaking 40+! They told me, "oh don't worry about it. We don't care about GRE scores because they don't tell us anything." Focus on a top quality writing sample, preferably 15-20 pages with a killer good introduction that lays out exactly what your paper is doing and why. Critical. You need your Intro to be very clear and tight because they will just look at the intro when they are giving the applications the first pass. They will judge based on the intro. Only applications that make it to further rounds in the weeding out process get their full papers read. And focus on your SoP. The blog "The Splintered Mind" has some good advice on these topics. If you can convey in your dossier of grades, coursework, writing sample, good letters, and SoP that you are perfectly competent, the math GRE score is not going to faze them. I think the fact that you are active in the field really says a lot more for you than you realize. I have a very good sense of these things because of much I am already involved in my department (been here 10 years!) and how things work. The other thing is this: you are who you are. In the end, you can't change what you are and what you have to work with. At some point you just gotta let it all loose and embrace it to the hilt and just do what you love by means of who you are. You can't afford to fret so much about this disadvantage and let it use up so much of your mental space. You're doing the philosophy thing just fine. Is it really a disability in respect to the field if you're performing just fine? It's extremely difficult to adopt an attitude of viewing oneself as NOT disabled when you've got the scientific/medical community and society screaming "disability!" in your face, but you've got to adopt the attitude that this is not really a disability in any relevant sense with respect to academic work. I mean, just look-- it isn't! Not that that will change other people's attitudes when they don't really know you, but survival in grad school is SO much more about your own attitude towards yourself than it is about others' attitudes towards you. People think about your abilities-- whether peers or supervisors-- a whole lot less than you think they do. Grad school is a battle against yourself, not against the system. It's about learning to work with yourself and who you happen to be. In the end, it's critical you come to adopt the posture and attitude of your own ability and let that show in the way you convey yourself or live your life. I had to take 7 years off from my PhD program to figure that out. Don't fret too much. Just give it your all.

This is no doubt a tough issue. I would guess that letter writers who know you well would mention your spatial processing disorder in their letters. You might encourage them to write about how this does not affect your academic abilities in the field, or to what extent it does (I.e, dealing with symbols). I think admission committees will want reassurance that a student with non-intellectual deficits can really do the work. That said, if possible, I think it would also be wise to take some grad level classes in philosophy in the coming year to demonstrate that you can succeed in doing the work. Then get a letter from that professor of that course(s). In addition, most university admissions applications ask if you have a disability and to explain what it is. you will probably want to elaborate on this in supplementary materials you submit with your applications, explaining in as medically sterile a way as possible that this is not an intellectual deficit. Most people just don't know anything about any of the vast variety of neurological or neuropsychological disorders out there and don't understand that they may have nothing to do with intellectual and problem solving aptitude. (My dad is a neuropsychologist, so I myself try not to make any assumptions, because I've learned so much about the different disorders that can affect the brain. But not many people have this perspective.). I think you are right to be concerned about how you may be viewed as a result, and so I think the best strategy to demonstrate how you have succeeded in the discipline and to define exactly what you are unable to do and what alternatives plans might be put into place to test your aptitude on things like math and logic where the standard practice is to rely on symbols or spatial depictions. If an admitting department can see how you yourself have worked through these obstacles successfully, they may be more confident that they can bring you on as well as confident that there are ways to work with the issue that they hadn't thought of. (You're partly working against the rigidity and lack of creativity of the people and the system. But if you can show them how you have creatively gotten through it, then that will also demonstrate both your intellectual aptitude and your commitment.) i hope others will chime in here who might have relevant experience...

I was explicitly told by a grad admissions director at a top 20 program just this fall that they don't care about GRE's "because they are predictive of nothing beyond students' first year performance." More than likely, a lot of departments are ignoring them, however the university graduate school to which the department belongs may require them nonetheless. Basically, admitting departments are just doing their own thing and don't care about what the university requires of students in their applications materials. This sounds about right, judging by all the people who reported shockingly mediocre GRE scores who were accepted to top 10 programs in last year's app season. (That's not intended as a knock on anyone. It's just to say GRE scores don't mean much about how you perform as an academic, as a philosopher, etc. They predict how well you trained for the GRE test conditions and questions. Departments have caught onto that.) Now everyone do as I say: breathe a sigh of relief and chill out about your GRE scores. Worse things to agonize over.