zombie4life

Wow. First, I doubt that the vast majority of adcoms/secretaries for adcoms are "lazy ass bitches." Second, sure, the secretary has a responsbility to make sure that all of your application materials are received and properly stored before the deadline. But after that deadline passes, whatever he or she does for your application is out of good will, not from any professional obligation to you. Yup.

I second the poster who said that applicants like ourselves won't be able to diagnose your chances well since we're not in a position to know what is "good enough" to get seriously considered for an acceptance. Even if we were armed with your SoP, writing sample, and letters of recommendation, I still don't think that would be enough for us to gauge your chances at any of those (really competitive!) programs. At least that's what I concluded from my own experience this season: I have really good stats and one of my letter writers used to be department chair at Brown. Still, I wasn't admitted there, though I've been admitted to a top 5 program. But as far as your grades go, I've seen people get admitted with scores comparable to yours and in some rare cases, even with lower scores. Good luck to you!

Sorry for being a downer--that wasn't my intention. But I thought I'd share because, from my own experience, a rejection feels twice as worse when you're secretly holding onto hope for an acceptance in the back of your mind.

hi everyone. here's a link to a Leiter discussion about the very topic of GREs and whether or not departments use GRE scores as a cut-off. i think it's pretty useful because you have graduate directors from programs like UNC and USC directly answering this question that i'm sure weighs heavily on a lot of people's minds. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/are-some-schools-using-undisclosed-gre-cut-offs-in-admissions-decisions.html good luck everyone!