ruraljuror

Their Public Policy PhD program only started in 2007-2008, so it looks like they've just had one graduate so far (http://gradschool.duke.edu/about/statistics/placepps.htm). I don't know whether that person was in a Sociology, Economics, or Political Science track, but in any event it would just be a sample size of 1. If you're looking for general information about the Public Policy PhD, you might have better luck in the Government Affairs section. There's more information available about statistics for their Sociology program as a whole at this link: http://gradschool.duke.edu/about/stats.php.

As I've been browsing through student profiles for some of the top public policy PhD programs, I've seen a surprising number of students who earned a professional/terminal master's before starting their PhD program. This seems atypical--any thoughts on why this might be the case?

When I first viewed my GRE scores online, I noticed that they had the wrong list of institutions to which the scores were being sent. I had listed several top schools in my state, but the schools displayed were all far-off schools with significantly less competitive admissions. I called ETS to point this out, and after a few days, the proper list displayed. My verbal and quant scores (680V/740Q) matched what I'd seen in the testing facility, but my AW score was lower than expected--a 4. I don't have a particularly great deal of faith that AW is a good indicator of one's writing ability, but I can't help but wonder whether the 4, too, is a vestige of whatever mixup was causing the wrong schools to display. Is that at all sensible? Is there any way I can have ETS confirm what text they graded? I'm not especially fond of the idea of asking for a rescore, but I'd like to have some more confidence that the score is what they gave my essays.