awdrgy

I'm currently doing this after having been shut out, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I'm actually planning on doing a second year if all goes well and hopefully I can get in somewhere next time around. The only downfall is that for programs in most countries that speak a major language (French, Spanish, German, etc.), you will already need an intermediate level knowledge of the language to be accepted.

The Committee on Social Thought in an independent PhD granting program at the University of Chicago. So to be admitted, you need to apply directly to the program, and unfortunately the deadline was December 15th (admissions details here)
That being said, there is also a philosophy and social thought joint program. So, for example, if you were admitted to the philosophy program, you could then apply to the joint program during your second year (see here).
 

Hey, as is evident, I've sold my entire livelihood with the distant hope of getting into a graduate program.
I was supposed to narrow down some programs, but I basically have decided to apply everywhere, which was either really stupid or really smart. Not sure which yet. There are definitely outstanding programs, but with my average GRE, no-name school, and niche, outlier interests I figured I'd cast a wide net.
I lean quite Continental and am also interested in Critical Theory and literary theory. I was drawn to heavy Continental programs, many not ranked on the PGR, but I looked carefully for publishing, teaching faculty in my AOIs. I applied to a couple of interdisciplinary programs, and I would be very pleased with either admit. Despite not finding much on the west (besides UO), I have a friend attending right now at UCI English, studying Marxism and Continental philosophy, so I tried to drop a few lines in UC though the UCI program is the main Marxist one where I feel I'd have a chance. I'd have done more English now if I had the chance, but I was pretty dead-set on "philosophy." I think my app is better for Philosophy, but there are definitely strong related programs in English for me.
Anyway, that's my story. More in the sig.

I disagree with your characterization of Bruya's article as containing "manufactured data from nowhere." Leiter and his allies are attempting to nitpick to death Brian Bruya's very compelling argument that the PGR's extreme sampling bias means its program rankings are unreliable.
Here is Brian Bruya's response to Leiter's criticism of his article: http://dailynous.com/2015/12/15/appearance-and-reality-take-2/
For those of you who want to reach your own conclusions, here's the link Bruya's original article, published in the journal Metaphilosophy: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/meta.12161/abstract

Hello, all.
 
Having spent some time lurking on these forums, I've noticed that one of the most enduring and ubiquitous questions here and elsewhere is, "Should I retake the GRE?" And for good reason--not only is it terribly important, but it is also a kind of epistemological brick wall, necessitating the consideration of so many factors and being so sensitive to context that it is pretty much impossible to obtain a satisfactory answer. Being unable to directly intuit the answer in my own case, and eager to turn my obsessive attitude re: graduate school applications toward something as all-consuming and satisfying as the Excel Spreadsheet, I assembled and analyzed a veritable mountain of data about the quantitative measures of students who self-reported here at the Grad Cafe.
 
In sections 1a and 1b, I will present the data and the results of analysis performed on that data. In section 2, I will discuss these results. In section 3, I will draw conclusions based on the discussion. In section 4, I will qualify those conclusions. In section 5, I will suggest some ways my analysis may help you answer the previous question about the GRE.
 
I performed the analysis on the data from about 600 applications to programs in which I had a personal interest. I recorded 1. Whether an applicant was accepted or rejected, 2. Their Verbal and Quantitative score, 3. Their GPA, and 4. Whether or not the applicant attended a Master's program. If an applicant attended a Master's program, I performed calculations on their Master's GPA instead of their UG GPA. The Analytical Writing section was not recorded. Though most GRE scores recorded were on the 130-170 scale, when I came across pre-2011 scores I simply converted them using the ETS concordance table (though this is not wholly unproblematic, and I will address it if you push me on it, but not otherwise).
 
These are the PhD programs I examined, with their PGR rank in parentheses, in no particular order:
 
Arizona (13)
Brown (20)
Pittsburgh (7)
Toronto (11)
Wisconsin-Madison (21)
MIT (12)
Princeton (2)
Stanford (8)
Yale (6)
CUNY Grad Center (16)
Harvard (6)
Rutgers (2) 
Texas-Austin (17)
Massachusetts-Amherst (28)
Columbia (10)
NYU (1)
Indiana-Bloomington (24)
Duke (24) 
Ohio State (28)
Berkeley (10)
UCLA (10)
 
1a. Means, deviations, correlations, explanatory effect
The average PGR ranking of the above programs is 13.2, their weighted average PGR ranking is 10.7, according to the number of recorded entries for each school. (Higher ranked programs get more applications, so it is unsurprising that the weighted average is lower than the average per se).
 
The first thing you ought to know about the GRE scores of those who apply to top programs is that they are often very high, and the scores of those who are accepted are even more impressive.
 
The mean Verbal score of applicants was 165.3. A score of 165 is at the 95th percentile of all GRE test-takers. The median of the applicants was 166, the 96th percentile.

The mean and median Quant score of applicants was 160.0, the 78th percentile of the general GRE population.

Consequently, the mean GRE score of applicants was 325.3, and though ETS does not assign percentile ranks to overall scores, it should be clear from the constituent parts that this not a shabby score.
 
The modal Verbal score was an impressive 169, with 97 of the 598 applicants who reported a verbal score scoring exactly 169, and nearly as many had a perfect 170 (82 applicants).
 
The modal Quant score was 155, with 57 students having a score of exactly 155.
 
The standard deviation of the Quant scores is 5.4, while the standard deviation of the Verbal scores is 4.1, indicating that the Verbal scores are more tightly grouped. For comparison, the standard deviation of verbal scorers for the more general population of GRE-takers is 8, and the standard deviation of Quant scores is 9, suggesting the relative uniformity of GRE scores among applicants.
 
A greater correlation between acceptance rate and one's Quantitative section score (r = .18, p <.0001) than between one's Verbal score (r = .16, p <.0001). However, both correlations are weak. The quantitative score is therefore a slightly better predictor of one's likelihood of being accepted (to the above fictional construction of a program, consisting of the weighted average of the individual programs), than one's verbal score.
 
The strongest correlation I found was between one's total GRE score and acceptance, at .22. Not much better. By squaring these r values, we can get the explanatory effect of each quantitative component. Total GRE scores explain 4.99% of application results, while the verbal score alone explains 2.45% of them, and the Quant score alone explains 3.37% of them. Taken together, they explain 10.81% of the data.

The minutely small correlation between GPA and application results (.04) failed to reach significance.
 
1b. Distribution, tiers
 
The small standard deviation of applicants' verbal scores coheres nicely with the witnessed distribution of those scores.
 
As you can see, quantitative scores are distributed more widely.
 
And here is the distribution of GRE scores.
 
Probably more important than the distribution of these scores is the success of applicants in these various score-groupings. The observed results in this vein are equal parts interesting and revealing. Total GRE scores as well as their component sections follow a very definitive, non-linear pattern.
 

(I am not great at Paint, assume all red lines are straight.) The horizontal lines represent tiers. If a tier-line passes through or above bars A and B, then A and B are members of the same tier. The vertical lines divide tiers, and represent thresholds. Moving from left to right across a threshold corresponds to an increase in acceptance rate (moving to a higher tier). Moving from right to left corresponds to a decrease in acceptance rate (moving to a lower tier). 
Here is the chart for Quant score.
 
And below is the corresponding chart for total GRE score:
 

You may be asking yourself whether the existence of tiers is significant, or whether these groups are simply arbitrary. You might also be wondering whether any rationale underlies the location of thresholds. I will address this shortly.
 
2. Discussion of results
 
In section 1a we established the relative unimportance of quantitative measures in the success of one's PhD applications. Departments are indeed telling the truth when they say that qualitative measures, especially the writing sample and letters of recommendation, are far and away the most important components of the application.
 
"Does this mean that my GRE and GPA are unimportant, that I can get into [prestigious school X] with a subpar GPA and GRE?"
This complex question has two parts best answered separately. To the first: absolutely not. GPA and GRE are very important parts of the application. The lesser importance of quantitative factors is best understood in the following way. Quantitative factors can be overridden by the more important, qualitative factors,  if those qualitative aspects are especially strong. This is the essential difference between quantitative and qualitative factors. Subpar writing samples and letters on the other hand, can never be overridden by any level of success on the GRE or in your undergraduate career.
 
"What do you mean, 'the correlation between GPA and acceptance failed to reach significance?'" 
It failed to meet certain standards of certainty required by correlational analysis. There is about a 32% chance that the correlation I found was due to chance, which is unacceptable. 
 
"If the correlation with GPA did reach significance though, would you expect it to be a good predictor of acceptance?"
 
No. GPA is too variable and unsteady a factor, due to differences in grading between schools, for us to expect a correlation of any significance. And further, GPAs among applicants are even clumpier. Almost everyone has a GPA greater than 3.6, and the average GPA applied is 3.85, with a standard deviation of 0.17. More than half of all applicants have a 3.9 or greater. Very clumpy.
 
"Quant score is a better predictor of acceptance. Does that imply that my Quant score is more important than my verbal score?"
 
No. I suspect the Quant correlation is greater than the Verbal one simply because the Verbal scores clump together near the top. Had I sampled more mid and low-range programs, I would expect the verbal score to correlate more strongly than the Quant score. Although Quant results explain a greater number of results, it does not necessarily explain a greater number of acceptances. Further, it should be noted that the Quant score's prominence may be the result of this particular range of schools. In programs strong in formal areas such as logic, it makes good sense for the Quant score to be weighed more heavily. If a number of those programs are represented here, this is a plausible explanation.
 
"Why are these tiers and thresholds not completely arbitrary?"
 
I believe there is compelling reason to think that the tiers and thresholds witnessed in the data represent something real. Although many graduate programs swear up and down that they do not use GRE score cut-offs, it is a well-known fact that the overwhelming number of applications they receive gives them little recourse but to use GRE scores to divide applicants into groups of more or less promise. The patterns above give us some insight into the (average, fictional) process of the representative school in this group.
 
In the Verbal chart, we see two thresholds creating three tiers, the first threshold dividing the groups 166 or lower from the groups 166 or higher. 166 is the median (50th percentile) verbal score of this group of applicants, and recall that 165.3 is the mean. The second threshold divides those who scored 169 or higher from those who scored exactly 170. Since 169 is such a common score, it is the 75th through 85th percentiles. A score of 170 represents the 90th percentile.

 
In the GRE chart, three thresholds create four tiers. The first threshold divides those who scored 325 or lower from those who scored 325 or higher. 325 is the median score of the applicant pool. The second divides those who scored 329 or higher from those who scored 330 or higher. 330 is the 75th percentile score. And the final threshold divides those who scored above 335 from those who scored 336. 336 is the 92nd and 93rd percentile, while 335 is the 90th.

 
In the Quant chart, we again have three tiers. The first threshold divides those who scored 160 or lower from those who scored 160 or higher. 160 is the median and mean Quant score. The second threshold divides those who scored 168 or higher from those who scored 167 or higher. 168 is the 95th percentile, while 167 is the 90th.

 
As you can see, these divisions demonstrate surprising regularity, suggesting that this is not merely a statistical accident, but rather reflects a fact about how departments carve up their applicant pools. 

 
All three scores are divided at their median score, with those who score higher than the median score being much more likely to be accepted than those who score below the median. A second threshold is found at the 75th percentile for the Verbal section and Overall score. And a final threshold is found in all three scores between those who score at the 90th percentile (or who score nearly perfectly) and those who score above the 90th percentile, or nearly perfectly.

 
What we know about committee procedures is consistent with the existence of the existence of tiers and the above analysis. On the face of it, this system may look dubious, and your first instinct may to be denounce it. After all, small differences in ability (like a 169 vs a 170 verbal) seem to be rewarded with large increases in chances of acceptance, while large differences in ability are largely ignored (those who score 166 or higher have the same chance of success as those who score 169 or higher). 

 
Things came together for me when I read something by Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor at UC Riverside, to the effect that letters of recommendations tend to blur together for him. Assuming that Eric is not substantively different in this respect from committee members across the country, and that a barrage of largely uniform quantitative measures are just as apt to blur together as a pile of generic letters of recommendation, I see no reason why we should not expect exactly the kind of distribution witnessed in the above data. Consequently, wide swaths of GRE scores are likely to receive similar attention, and thus, similar acceptance rates, with the lowest GRE scores receiving the least attention, and higher scores receiving more, but roughly equal, attention. Moreover, across the board, top-end or perfect scores are the most likely to signal to committee members that a file is worthy of closer inspection. Even if small differences at the top end of the score range do not represent large differences in ability, a higher score may substantially increase the likelihood that your file will be examined in further detail, and then green-lit.


 
"So you're saying that higher GRE scores cause this increase in acceptance rate?"

No. When you get down to thick of it, everyone who gets in does so on the merit of their sample and letters (and a few other qualitative factors, such as your origin of institution). However, in order be accepted, your application must first receive close scrutiny. And the strength of your quantitative profile directly bears on the likelihood that your application will be scrutinized more closely.
 
 
3. Conclusions
1) On the whole, those who apply and are accepted to top-ranked PGR programs have quite strong GRE scores.
 
2) The quantitative components of one's application are far less important than the qualitative ones (Letters and sample, institution of origin), as evidenced by the fact that they explain only about 11% of the data. (About 65 results, of 601)
 
3) Despite the fact that ETS revised the GRE in 2011 to make more finely discriminate between the ability of the highest scorers, Verbal scores are very closely grouped in the range 166-170. 
 
4) It is probably standard procedure to divide applicant pools into a bottom half and a top half, to more closely examine the upper half of that pile, and then most seriously consider the top 10% of the pool.
4. Qualifications
 
A number of factors qualify my results and impact my data. Firstly, all this data is self-reported. It is therefore entirely plausible that those who self-report have higher GRE scores than the average applicant, skewing all my score data upward by some unknown quantity.
 
Small quantities of data make it difficult to be confident about certain low-frequency scores. I therefore caution you to interpret acceptance rates as absolute quantities.It might be mistaken that 45% of those with a Verbal score of 170 were accepted, but we can be fairly sure that someone with a verbal score of 170 is more likely to receive an acceptance than someone with a Verbal score of 169. In fact, (((45.1/33.5) - 1) * 100) 34.6% more likely.
 
When total GRE's and Quantitative scores get very high, the margin of error is higher. The number of applicants who achieved a total GRE score of 338 or higher is only about 3% of the total sample size, and so I have excluded it from the GRE charts.
 
5. "So, should I retake the GRE?"
 
The foregoing analysis makes this question far more tractable than before. We can now break it into smaller sub-questions:
 
1. Is your current score at the cusp of the next threshold? (note: consult the charts)
2. Do you have independent reason to believe that you can do substantially better on your next retake? (e.g. you got rather poor sleep the night of the exam for a non-recurring reason, you were ravenously hungry during the test [both of these happened to me, ugh.].]
3. Does a department on which you are especially keen superscore?
 
If the answer to one of these questions is yes, you may want to consider re-taking the GRE.
 
However, I would not be so confident in my analysis as to be able to determine definitively whether or not you should retake the GRE, especially if you answer 'no' to the first question but 'yes' to the second and third.
 

Here is some possibly bad advice from someone who was once in a boat a little like yours and has just gotten accepted to a couple of very cool interdisciplinary programs where you can do stuff a bit like what you are saying.  But the road between A and B is not necessarily easy.
 
The first thing is: don't try to reinvent the wheel (this is a bit what your post sounds like).  Everyone already knows about Foucault, you can use him to think about institutions, the formation of subjects, blah blah blah.  Do not think of yourself as a "Fouauldian" or an exegete or else you will not get where you are trying to go.  Take a step back and ask, "Why I am interested in MF in the first place? What questions lead me to want to think about MF?"  Basically you need to decenter Foucault from your idea of what your intellectual project is if you want to do something other than disciplinary work (if you want to go into English lit, for example, it might be fine to be that into Foucault - but then you are just an epigone)
 
My suggestion is to plan to spend some time away from the academy for a couple years supporting yourself in other ways and reading as many books as possible.  You still have an enormous amount to learn and all it takes is time (you don't need a professor to tell you, just go read all the stuff you know you haven't read).  You may find that during this time, and in the bubble-bursting experience of no longer being in a formal educational environment, your idea of what you are interested in will change and become more refined.
 
I spent two years outside the academy, and I'm now finishing up an MA in English which I found deeply unsatisfying but which helped me understand what it is that I DO want to do.  It's only now, four years after my BA, that I'm really even qualified to begin doing the kind of interdisciplinary work that you seem to want to do.  And it's now finally paying off, but only after a period of four years which was not especially emotionally easy.
 
I would take some time off, find yourself a bit and read for several hours every day, apply to a disciplinary PhD program in English or Philosophy (make sure you get funding), and then bail with the MA and apply to an interdisciplinary program.  Some good candidates might be UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness, U Minnesota Discourse and Society, , Berkeley Rhetoric.  You could also apply to these programs right out of BA but probably much harder to get into.
 
basically, don't be in a hurry.  you can't do what you are saying you want to do if you are in a hurry.
 
good luck

I would focus more on faculty than the name of the program. Find departments with faculty whose interests align with your own and apply to those. It's more a matter of finding the right 'fit' than finding the right 'field'.

All good feedback so far. My only contribution is this: what do you want to teach? Do you want to teach writing, literature, foreign language, or philosophy? What you want to study is important to know, but you should also want to teach whatever subject you get your degree in.