ianfaircloud

Was it postal mail or email? And if postal, what's the first number if your zip code?

80 minutes later, and no more Madison rejections. I think the post isn't legitimate.

Brilliant!! We have threads for acceptances and rejections. It's high time we have a thread for wait-lists.

UW Madison rejection. Legitimate??

I don't mean to ridicule anyone, but I laughed out loud when I read that people relax by lifting weights. It's even funnier, because I know Occam's Razorburn. We're very different people, but I'm pretty sure that neither of us lifts weights (or would lift weights in any close possible world). I have some friends and family members who lift weights, exercise, or go jogging. (I'm pretty sure that's a soft 'J'.) I'm glad they take pleasure in these things.

Seems like that has to be good news at this point in the game. Surely they don't have the time to track down every missing page this late in February. I guess I'd be optimistic.

I want to be helpful, but I don't have enough information here. I recommend that you do the math to determine what your GPA will be with straight-As. A bad GPA can be explained away with the proper letters of recommendation and with evidence to show dramatic, recent improvement. A person who overcomes a crisis and finishes college with four semesters of straight-As can sometimes repair the earlier damage done to the transcript. You may not need the MA program; it may depend on how high you shoot in terms of PhD programs. In your case, I think your undergraduate institution won't be a liability except in PhD admissions at the highest levels. What's far more damaging to an application is holding a bachelor's degree from a no-name college with a poor academic reputation and a weak or nonexistent philosophy department. I often laugh when I hear others say that they, too, attended a weak undergraduate institution. Someone on this forum the other day suggested that their undergraduate institution was weak because it wasn't ranked in US News. I don't think people know what some of us mean when we say "weak" undergraduate institution. We're talking about schools that are barely accredited, schools with one philosopher, or with someone who is a "philosopher" without formal training in philosophy. Or "Bible colleges," as some call them. I know of only one person who was admitted to a top-ten department who earned a bachelor's at a Bible college; this person was an extremely rare exception, and this person went through a top-six MA program.

I love the idea of a confidence index of some kind. OK, so based on what I'm hearing, provided that I include some legal boilerplate for liability purposes, we have the foundations here. Please continue to post ideas. I'll see if I can make time for this sometime this week. I'll run the specifics by you all on this thread before I move forward. I don't want to devote time to something that isn't exactly what we're looking for.

I wondered about that. Let me make sure I understand your idea: Someone sets up an email account (or something similar), and that person asks people to submit some basic information with the promise that their anonymity would be preserved. Is that what you mean? I think this is a good idea, or at least it's as good as any. The problems, of course, are ( a ) people would have to trust that person to protect privacy, ( b ) that person would have to be trusted not to adjust the numbers or something to fit her/his purposes, © and there's still difficulty verifying the reliability of the incoming data. It's not fail-safe. But here's what I like about this idea. While it's easy for someone to falsify the info on the gradcafe results survey, people are less likely (presumably) to submit falsified data when it requires some typing, serious bullshitting, etc. Hence I'm way more confident about what's written in this forum than what's written on the results survey. I'm very interested to hear your thoughts and others' thoughts on this...

Would it meet everyone's needs to have a site that organizes anonymous submissions, where those submissions include relevant information about the offers? How do these sites filter submissions of false information? After looking through some very nice law school admissions sites, I've been thinking of putting something together. But I don't want to put something together that's not going to meet people's needs.

Yes. Harvard is an example.

Agreed. I'm very sympathetic to the well-intentioned goal behind standardized tests, but I think there are many problems with the way they are administered and (particularly) the way their results could be interpreted by admissions committees.

Thanks, folks, for posting rejections here. It helps us all see whether a rejection is legitimate.

Thanks, and congratulations! You're doing very well.

I can sense an argument coming on here, Table. I don't want to pollute the thread. People can read what I wrote and take it or leave it. What I wrote is based on anecdotal evidence, conversations with philosophers who sit on admissions committees, as well as my experience as a GRE instructor for a test-prep company. It sounds like your experience says otherwise, so maybe there's no final answer here.

I've been offline a lot more this last few days. This is a quick note to congratulate all those who have been successful so far. And to those who haven't, you're in very good company.

Yes, but feel free to do what your advisors tell you to do. In fact, common sense suggests that departments would be more than happy to answer very reasonable questions from those who they have on their wait-lists. Remember, they want you to attend, or they would have offered a precious spot to one of the other three hundred people on their list. Right? But maybe I'm missing something here. I'm not being sarcastic. I may be missing something. Maybe there's something I'm not thinking about, etc. Do you know why your advisors have said otherwise? (By the way, a thank you to Philosophia14 for starting this helpful thread!)

Good discussion. If I'm rejected, I'll blame my weak undergraduate institution and my time outside of philosophy. I think these are liabilities in philosophy admissions. I think when it comes down to it, departments will look at my weak undergraduate institution; they'll say that my undergraduate GPA is meaningless and that my graduate GPA is inflated. And because I have another master's degree in an unrelated field, they'll question my seriousness. But I may also blame bad luck. Because I'm convinced that great candidates can be unlucky. Then there's the possibility that I'm overconfident. Maybe I am deluded; I think I'm cut out for philosophy, and in fact I'm not. I really hope that's not true. I mean, I have some evidence of my philosophical potential: I was admitted in the first round to a very-solidly top-six MA program. But you know, not everyone in these programs is cut out for philosophy.

My view: the open question argument is good. The proof of an external world isn't.

I'm hearing a lot of people talk about GRE scores. While these matter a little, at some point, they don't matter that much. A 4.0 versus a 6.0 on AW, for instance, means almost nothing in philosophy admissions. And though some departments use cut-offs, after an application makes that cut, the rest is about the reputation of the institutions attended, the strength of the letters, and the strength of the writing sample. I'm in a particularly good position to comment on this. I teach test-prep with a well-known, national brand in the industry. Also, common sense suggests that the GRE can't be much of a factor beyond the cut-off. GRE numbers won't tell a committee whether one applicant with a great writing sample is going to be a better philosopher than another applicant with a great writing sample. Everybody knows that many great GRE scores were purchased not with strength of intellect but with time and money. You get a reasonably high score, and the score becomes a non-factor. You don't get the reasonably high score, then your score becomes a liability.

Well, when some of us speak of the liability of attending a weak undergraduate institution, we're talking about schools you've literally never heard of. Schools with open admissions in rural Nebraska.

My position on this question is based purely on a hunch.

REPOSTED from other thread: If you've been wait-listed, it's completely appropriate to ask what that means for you. Ask to know the length of the wait-list and your position in line. Some departments have unranked wait-lists. I think, e.g., Harvard's list is short and unranked. But it's neither inappropriate nor unexpected for applicants to ask these questions.

Did someone call for an admissions ninja? Based on historical data, for what it's worth, I think Notre Dame's wait-list is between five and ten applicants long. If you've been wait-listed, it's completely appropriate to ask what that means for you. Ask to know the length of the wait-list and your position in line. Some departments have unranked wait-lists. I think, e.g., Harvard's list is short and unranked. But it's neither inappropriate nor unexpected for applicants to ask these questions.

This is a good question. I'm anxious to hear the answer. In the meantime, notice that Michigan has apparently sent few first-round acceptances. Additionally, Michigan has apparently sent no wait-list notifications. (See the results pages.) So for what it's worth, there's some evidence that suggests 'Hopephily' is correct. I think Michigan will do much more in March.